Fig. 1

Exploratory data analyses. A Score plot of a PLS performed on the data of the 62 studied genes: The ducklings from R group and C group are represented with triangles and circles, respectively. The females are in red and the males in blue. The two latent variables summarized respectively 28% (horizontal axis) and 10% (vertical axis) of the whole variability. B Biplot of a PCA performed on the data of the 22 differential genes: The male ducklings from the R group (MR) and the C group (MC) are represented in red crosses and grey squares, respectively, and the females from the R group (FR) and the C group (FC) are in yellow triangles and blue circles, respectively. The first principal component (horizontal axis) explained 43.1% of the whole variability and discriminated the samples according to the diet received by the dams (R groups on the left side versus C groups on the right side). The second principal component (vertical axis) explained 10.2% of the whole variability and slightly discriminated the two sexes in the C group only. In addition, the correlation circles showed correlations between the 22 differential genes and the two main principal components and show an opposite regulation pattern of GLRX and MTR when compared to the 20 other differential genes. For both Fig. 1A and B, the qqnorm transformed normalized relative expressions were used