This makes shrunken LFCs also suitable for ranking genes, e.g., to prioritize them for follow-up experiments. For example, if we sort the genes in the two sample groups of Figure 3 by unshrunken LFC estimates, and consider the 100 genes with the strongest up- or down-regulation in group I, we find only 21 of these again among the top 100 up- or down-regulated genes in group II. However, if we rank the genes by shrunken LFC estimates, the overlap improves to 81 of 100 genes (Additional file 1: Figure S3).
