Targeting Vitiligo and COVID-19 with AM

This research does not involve the ethics of human and animal experiments.To identify potential targets of AM for vitiligo and COVID-19, we searched the comprehensive gene expression database GEO^{16 (link)}, (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo). The species "human" was selected as the study subject and the dataset GSE75819 with samples from healthy volunteers and vitiligo lesion skin samples. Differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between lesioned and healthy volunteers were screened by GEO2R (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/geo2r). Probe sets without corresponding gene symbols or multiple probe sets were removed or averaged, respectively. adj. P values < 0.05 and |LogFC|< 1 were considered statistically significant.
To identify the disease targets of AM for the treatment of COVID-19, we used the Genecards website (https://www.genecards.org) to search for COVID-19 disease related targets using "COVID-19", "coronavirus disease", and "coronary pneumonia" as search terms.
Then the disease targets of vitiligo and COVID-19 were matched with the targets of the active ingredients of AM and imported into Venny 2.1 online website (https://bioinfogp.cnb.csic.es/tools/venny/index.html), which was displayed as a Venn diagram, and the overlapping part intersection of the two was the crossover genes of AM for vitiligo and COVID-19.
To investigate the clustering of the crossover genes in the GSE75819 dataset, we finally drew the clustering heatmap of the crossover genes through the ImageGP website (http://www.ehbio.com/ImageGP/index.php/Home/Index/index.html).