We also used a rat epicardial cell line (Wada et al., 2003) to investigate potential downstream targets of NRP1 and found that downregulating the expression of NRP1 via small hairpin (sh)RNA adenovirus infection, led to a decrease in β-catenin expression, which is an important regulator of EMT (Duan et al., 2012; von Gise et al., 2011; Zamora et al., 2007). This evidence concerns the gene NRP1 and adenoviridae infectious disease.