In accordance with the expression data of the 32 genes in control and AP samples of the GSE121038 dataset in Additional file 3: Table S3, an expression heat map of these 32 genes was plotted, which revealed that Foxa2, PRDM16, ANGPT1, Dicer1 and Rbpjl were significantly down-regulated in AP (Fig. 1C). This evidence concerns the gene RBPJL and alkaline phosphatase measurement.