The Research On GTEx Tissue Network Based On WGCNA

The GTEx project is also called Genotype-Tissue Expression Project,which establishes a resource database and related tissue libraries for the scientific community to study the relationship between genetic variation and gene expression in human tissues.The existence of this project enables researchers to pay more attention to the specificity and commonality of genes in the tissues,and to explore the relationship between genes and researcher's research priorities in the tissue,thus facilitating the research and analysis of human tissues.The weighted gene co-expression network analysis method is the most widely used and accepted network research method in biological data research.It is often used to explore the relationship between a disease and a gene,in order to make the judgment of disease-causing genes and drug research.However,most of the studies only focus on one co-expression network or compare two gene co-expression networks under two conditions(e.g.,disease versus normal or human versus mouse).A systematic comparison of co-expression networks and modules across a cohort of human tissues is more or less ignored.Comparing tissue-specific co-expression networks is essential to evaluate tissue heterogeneity,which is critical for tissue-specific disease studies and drug design.Therefore,this paper uses the WGCNA method to establish a gene co-expression network for each tissue by using 52 human tissue data provided by the GTEx project.The hypothesis test method was then used to study the correlation between tissues and to find the most similar tissues.The GO analysis was then used to analyze the function of the tissue network.And the common functions among the tissues were found,and the enrichment of immune and inflammation-related functions was analyzed.The experimental results show that the networks of most tissues are significantly correlated.However,the level of similarity between tissues is different,and tissues adjacent to physical locations appear to be more similar in their co-expression networks.For example,two adjacent tissue Fallopian tubes and bladders have the hypothesis test result which is closest to zero in all tissue pairs.At the same time,almost all tissues have immune functions.However,in some tissues,there are highly enriched modules related to immune and inflammation such as liver,kidney cortex,lung,uterus,fat subcutaneous,and fat visceral omentum.This paper systematically studies and compares the gene co-expression network of human tissues.It is believed that this research will provide a basis for furtherresearch on human tissue in the future.