(f) Bioinformatics analysis
To study the enriched biological function and significant pathways of
the differentially expressed proteins, the identified proteins UniProt
IDs were used to run Gene Ontology (GO) term analysis. The homology
search was performed for all identified sequences against the zebra
finch (Taeniopygia guttata ) using NCBI BLASTX program (Kent,
2002). The zebra finch Uniprot IDs were assigned for the best hit
sequence for GO annotation and enrichment analysis using ShinyGO online
software (Ge et al., 2020). The GO enrichment results were presented in
three functional categories based on the properties of the identified
proteins: biological process (BP), cellular component (CC), and
molecular function (MF). In addition, all the differentially expressed
proteins were searched against the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Gene and
Genomes (KEGG) database to identify the significant KEGG pathways. To
further identify significant mechanisms underlying differentially
expressed proteins associated with functional clusters of DEPs, GO term
enrichment and KEGG pathways analysis was performed by Fisher’s exact
test. GO terms with FDR values < 0.05 and KEGG pathways with
FDR p values < 0.1 were identified as significantly enriched.
Results