I have a dataset having 4 rna seq healthy tissue samples prepared with unstranded Illumina library and another dataset with 8 rna seq healthy tissue samples prepared with reverse stranded Illumina library. I wish to combine these 2 datasets together and run DGE with a third dataset having 100 tumor tissue samples. But DESEQ2 takes in raw counts as input. Can I normalize each dataset seaprately and then merge them together to run DESeq2?
Also, should I also run ComBat or sva after DESeq2 and then use that file as input to make PCA, t-SNE etc?