False and true positives in arthropod thermal adaptation candidate gene lists

Genome-wide studies are prone to false positives due to inherently low priors and statistical power. One approach to ameliorate this problem is to seek validation of reported candidate genes across independent studies: genes with  repeatedly discovered effects are less likely to be false positives. Inversely, genes reported only as many times as expected by chance alone, while possibly representing novel discoveries, are also more likely to be false positives. We show that, across over 30 genome-wide studies that reported Drosophila and Daphnia genes with possible roles in thermal adaptation, the combined lists of candidate genes and orthologous groups are rapidly approaching the total number of genes and orthologous groups in the genome, respectively, consistent with the expectation of high frequency of false positives. The majority of these spurious candidates have been identified by one or a few studies, as expected by chance alone. In contrast, a noticeable minority of genes have be..., Meta-analysis of literature data. Studies included used either transcriptomics or GWAS/local adaptation approaches.,