What is the best approach to correlate expression levels, mutated genes and clinical variables

Question

[Lila M]

Hi there, I was wondering which could be the best approach to correlate expression levels (from RNA -seq) mutated genes and clinical variables for a specific patients data set. I have two data frames, let's call them exp with the typical RNA-seq data processed by DESeq2 and other table with genes (1: mutated, 0 no mutated) and clinical variable of interest, let's call it mutated, that looks like this:

ID             gene1   gene2   gene3   gene4  var
patient1       0         1        0     0     low
patient2       0         0        0     1     high
patient3       1         1        0     0     low

any ideas? Thank you!