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Counts plot does not match fold change between groups

Hello all,

I have patient data that are grouped based on a characteristic. I ran DESeq2 between the two groups following the tutorial. Everything seems fine but when I plot one of the top differentially regulated genes using plotCounts(), it seems the difference is driven by few outliers. Here is one example that DESeq2 outputs more than 6 log2FoldChange that is highly significant:

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I would appreciate if you can help me understand this issue. My feeling is that the counts are not normalized so it may not show the difference?

Thanks

rna-seq deseq2

2 answers

Driven by outliers or not, (you really want to say that 3/7 samples are outliers?) the two sets of samples pretty clearly have different means, so the software was right to flag that.

Have all the sequencing libraries been processed equally? Do they come from the same run? Maybe you have a batch issue there.

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