Fig. 1

Transcriptional regulatory network and master regulators. a Human hippocampus transcription regulatory network centered on transcription factors was reconstructed from normal brain dataset (GSE60862). The network shows 469 regulatory units of transcripts classified under transcription factor activity, sequence-specific DNA binding (GO:0003714), with more than 25 inferred targets; 132 of them showed more than 100 inferred targets and were considered tissue-specific regulatory units (blue container). These were then tested in AD case-control studies using master regulator analysis, resulting in 34 tissue-specific regulatory units significantly enriched with differentially expressed genes (red container). The 337 regulatory units with less than 100 targets are represented in black outside the blue container. b Tile plot representation of the MR candidates for each case-control expression dataset (GSE5281, GSE29378, GSE36980, and GSE48350). ns not significant