Following the publication of this article, an interested reader drew to our attention that we had incorrectly reported (in the Materials and methods section, 'Western blot analysis', on p. 674) that the anti-farnesoid X receptor (FXR) antibody of Cell Signalling Technology, Inc., cat. no. #12295, had been used in this study to probe for FXR. In fact, the antibodies used in the above-mentioned study were a gift from the group of Dr Xin-Liang Ma at Thomas Jefferson University (Philadelphia, PA, USA), as referenced in the following article: [Pul J, Yuan A, Shan P, Gao E, Wang X, Wang Y, Lau WB, Koch W, Xin-Ma XL and He B: Cardiomyocyte-expressed farnesoid-X-receptor is a novel apoptosis mediator and contributes to myocardial ischaemia/reperfusion injury. Eur Heart J 34: 1834-1845, 2013]. The antibody that was used for the western blotting analysis was raised against the C-terminus of FXR (C-20; cat. no. sc-1204, Santa Cruz Biotechnology, San Diego, CA, USA). We sincerely apologize for this mistake, and thank the reader of our article who drew this matter to our attention. The error made in our incorrect referencing of the antibody did not affect the conclusions reported in this study. Furthermore, we regret the inconvenience that this mistake caused. [the original article was published in the Molecular Medicine Reports 16: 673-679, 2017; DOI: 10.3892/mmr.2017.6643].