Mahesh Kumar Padwal

1 INTRODUCTION A living cell constantly engages with its surroundings to optimize cellular processes for survival advantage, though interactions with unfavorable environmental stressors are inevitable. Notwithstanding the adversities, perpetual adaptations through gene(s) acquisitions, losses, or mutations in conjunction with natural selection drive the dynamics of the microbial world (Leprince & Buitink, 2010; Potts, 2001).

2. Material and Methods 2.1. RNA-SEQ Datasets and Processing RNA-SEQ datasets of NET tissues (n = 214) used in this study are listed in Table 1. Raw SRA files were converted to fastq files [https://github.com/rvalieris/parallel-fastq-dump, accessed on 5 April 2022], and read quality was checked with FASTQC [18]. Low-quality reads were removed with Trimmomatic in a single-end mode (parameters: LEADING: 10, TRAILING: 10, SLIDING WINDOW: 4:15, MINILEN: 35) [19].