After the publication of the article, the authors realize that the grant funding number for the support that they received from Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province appeared incorrectly in the Funding section of the paper: This should have been featured as grant no. LY15H200001 (i.e., with an 'L' at the start of the number). The authors regret that this error was not corrected prior to the publication of their paper, and apologize to the funders for any inconvenience caused. [the original article was published in International Journal of Molecular Medicine 42: 2689-2699, 2018; DOI:10.3892/ijmm.2018.3831].