A pathway is an interconnected arrangement of processes, representing the functional roles of genes in the genome. The biological processes in which individual genes may participate were identified using the “Gene Ontology” database AmiGO (http://amigo.geneontology.org). The DEG were assembled into networks using Ingenuity Pathway Analysis (IPA Ⓒ) (http://www.ingenuity.com). This application includes algorithms that automatically identify the biological pathways and functions of selected genes. It is based on a large bibliographic database with various types of interaction already identified between pairs of genes. Every biological network extracted by IPA corresponds to the best possible arrangement of the genes, and are associated with a score derived from a p-value (right-tailed Fisher’s exact test, − log10-transformed).