*2.4. Validation of Selected DEG Confirms RNA-Seq Data Reliability*

Twenty-one DEGs of different FPKM levels were selected for validation by qRT-PCR (Table S2). The quantification data were used to correlate with the FPKM value of each treatment. Among them, twenty genes showed a positive linear correlation between the FPKM and qRT-PCR data, with the correlation coefficient *R<sup>2</sup>* ranging from 0.6785 \* to 0.9721 \*\* (Figure 4). One gene could not be amplified due to the primers failure. This affirmative validation result indicates that the transcriptome profiling generally reflected the virtual transcript expression differences in the experiment.

**Figure 4.** Correlation of qRT-PCR validation and RNA-seq results in 20 representative genes. \* and \*\* represent significance at *p* ≤ 0.05 and *p* ≤ 0.01, respectively.
