After the publication of the article, the authors noted that the name of the first author had been spelt incorrectly. The name of the first author should be correctly written as XIUMEI WANG and not as XIEMEI WANG. This had occurred due to a typing error on behalf of the authors upon submission. [the original article was published in the International Journal of Molecular Medicine 35: 973-978, 2015; DOI: 10.3892/ijmm.2015.2081].