Fig. 2

Identification of common PFAS and HCC-associated targets and PPI network analysis. A Venn diagram showing the overlap between 855 PFAS-associated targets (derived from SwissTargetPrediction and CTD databases) and 965 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in HCC (obtained from TCGA-LIHC, n = 355, tumor vs. adjacent normal liver tissues). Differential expression was determined using DESeq2 with |log2 FoldChange| > 1 and FDR < 0.05. B PPI network of the 174 overlapping targets constructed using the STRING database (confidence score > 0.40; organism: Homo sapiens). C Visualization of the STRING-based PPI network in Cytoscape (version 3.10.2), showing interaction complexity and node connectivity. D Top 20 hub genes identified using the CytoHubba plugin in Cytoscape based on four ranking algorithms: MNC, Degree, EPC, and Closeness