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Network-Based Meta-Analyses of Associations of Multiple Gene Expression Profiles with Bone Mineral Density Variations in Women

He H, Cao S, Niu T, Zhou Y, Zhang L, Zeng Y, Zhu W, Wang YP et al.

PloS one, 2016

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Existing microarray studies of bone mineral density (BMD) have been critical for understanding the pathophysiology of osteoporosis, and have identified a number of candidate genes. However, these studies were limited by their relatively small sample sizes and were usually analyzed individually. Here, we propose a novel network-based meta-analysis approach that combines data across six microarray studies to identify functional modules from human protein-protein interaction (PPI) data, and highlight several differentially expressed genes (DEGs) and a functional module that may play an important role in BMD regulation in women.

METHODS: Expression profiling studies were identified by searching PubMed, Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) and ArrayExpress. Two meta-analysis methods were applied across different gene expression profiling studies. The first, a nonparametric Fisher's method, combined p-values from individual experiments to identify genes with large effect sizes. The second method combined effect sizes from individual datasets into a meta-effect size to gain a higher precision of effect size estimation across all datasets. Genes with Q test's p-values 50% were assessed by a random effects model and the remainder by a fixed effects model. Using Fisher's combined p-values, functional modules were identified through an integrated analysis of microarray data in the context of large protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks. Two previously published meta-analysis…

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