Pathway analysis of meta-gene list

The resulting meta-gene list was compared with the original DE gene list in each of the original studies. To identify significant pathways from the meta-gene list, over-representation analysis (ORA) was performed using Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) and p-values were adjusted by Benjamini-Hochberg’s False Discovery Rate (FDR). A protein-protein interaction (PPI) network was constructed based on STRING database (Szklarczyk et al., 2019 (link)) and then visualized by a web-based tool¹ (Xia et al., 2014 (link), 2015 (link); Zhou et al., 2019 (link)). Hub nodes were identified by high degrees and high centrality from the PPI network. The results were then compared with the network constructed by WEB-based GEne SeT AnaLysis Toolkit (Zhang et al., 2005 (link); Wang et al., 2013 (link), 2017 (link); Liao et al., 2019 (link)).