Fig. 5

Cell differentiation regulatory network generated from broilers’ downregulated DEGs. A gradient of blue was used to indicate downregulated DEGs; darker blue indicates lower expression levels. DEGs representing ligands, receptors, and transcription factors are represented as parallelograms, round rectangles, and octagons, respectively. DEGs encoding other protein classes are shown as ellipses. Regulatory genes are represented either as bold octagons (transcription factors) or diamonds (proteins involved in epigenetic modifications). Arrows indicate the interaction between the regulator and the target gene. White geometric shapes denote genes that are not DEGs