Analysis of Pathways Profile

PA was conducted via MetaCore software (GeneGo Inc., division of Thomson Reuters) after the differentially expressed genes were identified. All differentially expressed genes were uploaded and mapped to the GeneGo database. P values were used to measure the significant genes and canonical pathways, which was calculated by Fisher's exact test. A lower p value indicated a higher correlation between the gene and the ontology category. The level of statistical significance was set at P < 0.05, which could screen out all the canonical pathways with a P < 0.05 and a fold change >1.5 for further analysis. We uploaded the list of significantly differentially expressed genes in the BA, JA, UA, BJ, and JU groups into the MetaCore software for functional PA. Pathway enrichment analyses were performed via the MetaCore software (defining an enriched pathway as having an enrichment P value < 0.05). All the enriched pathways were listed in Supplementary Figure 1 . The function catalogue to which the pathways belong was defined according to the classification of the software itself. Pathways with identical functions were grouped into one category.