Likewise, we determined the Pearson correlation coefficients between each of the DEGs and the remaining genes to assess the potential major biological implications of DEG networks. We collected the top 10% of most connecting DEGs (n = 73) (i.e. the subset of DEGs showing connections to the largest number of other DEGs) and the top 10% of non-differentially expressed genes (n = 300) that had the most connections with DEGs. The function relationship and enrichment among these 373 genes were analyzed by the software ClueGO [67], with the resultant networks visualized by the Cytoscape [68].
