Our results also identified genes with the highest association with upstream regulators, including ABAT (Fig. 3b), ENSBTAG00000050205 (Fig. 4a), NRXN2 (Fig. 4b) and ENSBTAG00000052846 (Fig. 4c), which have not been previously reported in mastitis but may play an important role in this disease based on the following literature review results. This evidence concerns the gene NRXN2 and mastitis.