Figure 3.
Verification of the predicted ACE2-regulating pathways using independent bulk RNA-seq data of BALF samples from COVID-19 patients. (A) Heatmap of the top 200 significantly up-regulated and down-regulated genes (fold change >2, P < 0.01) in BALF of COVID-19 patients compared to healthy controls. (B) Significantly activated pathways in COVID-19 samples and the overlapped genes in the inferred multilayer networks. The Fisher’s exact test was used to assess the significance of activation of each KEGG pathway based on the DEGs. The overlapped ligand–receptor genes and TFs between the significantly activated pathways and the multilayer networks were also listed. (C) A diagram illustrating ACE2-regulating pathways that were significantly activated in COVID-19 patients.