How do edgeR calculate p.value without replicates?

Question

[dahun73]

Hi everyone!

I'm curious about analyzing RNA-seq data.

I have only 2 samples(Con vs Exp) for analyzing RNA-seq. I've known there is no statistical power without replicates. But after filtering p.value < 0.05, there are more than 500 significant DEGs. Can I believe these DEGs are significant? And how do edgeR calculate p.value in this case?

Thank you in advance! Dahun

[ATpoint]

This is not possible. Did you manually feed in a dispersion value? With no replicates the estimateDisp will throw an error. Could you show some code? In any cases, yes, this is not reliable.