HP and thalassemia: To better understand the biologic functions related to DEGs, we executed Gene Ontology (GO)-enrichment analysis, and noted that molecular function was significantly enriched in haptoglobin binding, cytokine binding, structural constituent of ribosome, oxygen binding, and immunoglobulin receptor binding—indicating that in addition to the changes in globin binding, hemoglobin binding, and oxygen binding, many other related molecular functions were also significantly different in the thalassemia group (Figure 3A).