Fig. 4

Examination of changes in gene expression between lean ACs and obese ACs. Changes in gene expression are allocated into eight different categories: ‘progressive-up/down’, ‘initial-up/down’ ‘later-up/down’, and ‘up-to-down/down-to-up’. Each category of DEGs is obtained by intersecting ‘LI-DEGs’ and ‘IO-DEGs’ (refer to Additional file 6: Figure S3 for the detailed strategy for the subcategorization). A heatmap is generated for each category of DEGs with genes assigned to each category. The bars in the first column represent the trend of gene expression levels in each category, and the blue, gray, and red lines surrounding each bar represent genes in the L_e, I, and O_e categories, respectively