2.5. Functional enrichment analysis

Differentially Expressed Genes (DEGs), namely up-regulated and down-regulated genes, were analyzed with WebGestalt (WEB-based Gene SeT AnaLysis Toolkit, http://www.webgestalt.org), to identify genes with similar functions (Wang et al., 2013). Enrichment analyses were conducted studying the Gene Ontology categories with a p-value lower than 0.05 in a hypergeometric test. The method used for enrichment analysis was the Over-Representation Analysis (ORA). WebGestalt gene tables summarization and volcano plots were used to summarize and visualize the enrichment results.