Fig. 4

Calculation of pathway activity based on metabolomic data analysis. a The Table shows pathways that significantly differentially activity levels were discovered in pairwise comparisons (t-test, p < 0.05) between any two of the three time points (T0, T1, T8). b Heatmap for significantly different pathway activities. Red represents higher pathway activity while green stands for a less active. Pathway names were marked with three columns of signs, illustrating the significant level of the three pathway-based pairwise comparisons. From left to right, three signs represent the T1:T0, T8:T0 and T8:T1 comparisons, respectively. ‘+’ stands for significantly more active (T1 > T0, T8 > T0 or T8 > T1), ‘-’ stands for significantly less active (T1 < T0, T8 < T0 or T8 < T1), and ‘=’ is for statistically insignificant comparisons. The significance cut-off was set to p-value < 0.05