Integrative analysis of Mendelian randomization and gene expression profiles reveals a null causal relationship between adiponectin and diabetic retinopathy

Figures

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  Figure 1.. Results of the Mendelian randomization analysis investigating the causal effect of adiponectin on diabetic retinopathy. a) Forest plot displaying the effect estimates. b) Comparison of the four MR analysis methods employed. c) Funnel plot assessing directional horizontal pleiotropy. d) Leave-one-out analyses detecting outliers.

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  Figure 2.. Results of the transcriptomic data analysis. a) Boxplots representing the expression values of adiponectin-related genes, accompanied by the corresponding p-values obtained from non-parametric test p-values. The boxplots illustrate gene expression values along the y-axis, with the gene symbols of the six adiponectin-related genes listed on the x-axis. These boxplots demonstrate that none of the adiponectin-related genes displayed significant differential expression among the three groups. Here, p-value indicate the corresponding p-values of Kruskal-Wallis non-parametric tests conducted on each specific genes. b) 2D tSNE scatterplot showing these 6 genes had no discriminative ability to distinguish the three groups. To visualize the segmentation results obtained from the 6 genes, a tSNE scatterplot was generated. The x-axis and y-axis represent the first two tSNE components. The scatterplot clearly demonstrates that the samples from the three different groups are intermingled, indicating that these 6 genes lack discriminative ability. C: Normal control; D: diabetic group without retinopathy; DR: diabetic retinopathy group.

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  Figure 3.. Venn diagrams showing how the identified differentially expressed genes (DEGs) overlapped across the three comparisons. This Venn diagram demonstrates the absence of shared genes between these three gene sets.