How to statistically determine if a mutation has an impact on expression individually for one patient

Question

[jeni]

Hi!

I am studying a group of cancer patients from which I have INDELs (from DNA fastq) and expression data (RNAseq), both from a tumoral and a normal sample for each one of them.

As I know some genes affected by potential pathogenic insertions or deletions, I would like to assess, for each patient, an effect of the alteration in its expression. As this analysis is performed individually for each patient, as these mutations are unique, I am not sure how to perform it statistically. I would like to compare the expression levels between tumour and normal sample for each individual patient. As the comparisson is between two samples, I cannot perform an usual differencial expression analysis.

How can I achieve this?

Thanks!

[ATpoint]

Statistics and n=1 are mutually exclusive. You would need at least some n to perform some kind of regression analysis.