Fig. 5

Transcriptomic data analysis. (A) PCA plot of RNA-seq data colored by pregnancy complications groups: CTL (green), GDM (blue), PE (orange) and PG (red). (B) Volcano plots displaying DEGs between GDM, PE, and PG groups and CTL. Up-regulated genes (FDR < 0.25 and log₂(FC) > 0) are shown in red and down-regulated genes (FDR < 0.25 and log₂(FC) < 0) are shown in blue. (C) Heatmap showing scaled median expression levels of 776 DEGs for protein coding function across all groups, clustered into six distinct gene clusters. Hierarchical clustering was performed using ward.D2 method based on correlation distance. (D) Bar plots displaying the selected significantly enriched pathways (FDR < 0.1) for each DEG cluster. (E) Violin plots showing expression levels of previously reported genes that associated with GDM and PE. (F) Violin plots highlighting novel DEGs identified in this study as being specifically associated with GDM, PE, or PG. Statistical significance was assessed using the Wilcoxon test (**: p-value < 0.01, *: p-value < 0.5 and ns: non-significant).