A database called Search Tool for the Retrieval of Interacting Genes (STRING) is used to study the functional protein association networks (Szklarczyk et al., 2017 (link)). The filtered DEGs had already been added to the STRING database. All PPI pairs with a cumulative score greater than 0.4 were retrieved. High-degree nodes seem to be essential for maintaining the network’s overall stability. The degree of all nodes was calculated by Cytoscape (v3.6.1) plugin cytoHubba using the MCC algorithm (Chin et al., 2014 (link)), in this experiment, the genes with the top 10 highest MCC score values were considered as hub genes.
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