The GEO dataset: GSE40611 was obtained from the National Center For Biotechnology Information (NCBI) Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) (7 (link)) using the “Sjogren’s Syndrome” and “parotid” criteria. This microarray dataset has been based on the platform of Affymetrix Human Genome U133 Plus 2.0 Array (HG-U133_Plus_2) and contains parotid tissue samples from 20 healthy donors, 19 patients with Sjogren syndrome, and 20 patients with “Sicca syndrome”. Before differential expression analysis, background correction and quantile normalization were performed using the robust multi-array analysis (RMA) method with the limma R package (v3.11) (13 (link)), thus generating the normalized gene expression matrix. In addition, differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified using the criteria of false discovery rate (FDR) <0.05 or <0.1, depending on the proportion of DEGs among the total.
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