Elucidating the potential carcinogenic molecular mechanisms of parabens in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma through network toxicology and molecular docking
Fig 5
Validation of hub gene expression in HNSCC using independent GEO datasets.
The mRNA expression levels of the identified hub genes were analyzed in three independent HNSCC cohorts from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) repository. (A) GSE83519 (22 paired tumor and adjacent normal tissues), Note: A constant value (C = 3.911890567) was added to the raw expression data prior to log₂ transformation to eliminate negative values. This constant value was calculated as |min (negative value)| + 0.001 to enable transformation of negative values; (B) GSE58911 (15 paired samples); (C) GSE160042 (10 paired samples). Differential expression between tumor and matched adjacent normal tissues is shown for each dataset. Statistical significance was determined by paired t-test (p < 0.05).