Functional Enrichment Analysis

The functional profiling of DEGs into 3 gene ontology categories, biological processes, cellular components, and molecular functions, was performed using G:Profiler (Raudvere et al., 2019; Meleagris gallopavo as the reference organism) with P < 0.05. For additional evaluation of DEGs related to epididymis and ductus deferens, PANTHER 14.1 software was used (Thomas et al., 2003; Mi et al., 2013; Gallus gallus as the organism). To establish possible interactions between identified genes and the network of predicted associations for genes, all identified DEGs were submitted to STRING (Search Tool for Retrieval of Interacting Genes; Szklarczyk et al., 2019), with a medium confidence score cutoff of 0.4.