Joining neighboring timepoints in high-resolution sampled RNAseq experiment

Question

[kagan.ferenc]

Hello everyone. I am no expert therefore I would like to kindly ask the help of the community. I have a RNAseq dataset for different developmental stages. Embryos were sampled every 30 minutes and pooled together for every timepoint. I would like to perform a differential gene expression analysis with this dataset but I lack replicates for variance estimation. In this paper (https://dev.biologists.org/content/141/9/1927) if I understood correctly one could join neighboring timepoints with high Pearson correlation and use these as replicates. I would like to ask for the opinion of the community if this is a valid approach? If so how should this be done?

Thank you very much for the help in advance!

[ATpoint]

Can you post a summary table that indicates which samples you have and how they are related to each other? It is difficult to know your experimental setup.