Among these 47 lincRNAs, four were in the vicinity of the HF development-related genes and two were near the keratin-associated proteins (Additional file 7: Table S3) and one (linc-chig1598) was close to two transcription factors, DLX4 and DLX3. The DLX transcription factors play critical roles in epidermal, neural and osteogenic cellular differentiation, and DLX3 is a crucial regulator of HF differentiation and cycling [43, 49]. The gene discussed is DLX3; the disease is hydrops fetalis.