The 62 genes were analyzed for GO biological processes using GeneCodis, which revealed the highly enriched terms that were strongly associated with AMD pathology. To ensure only the most enriched annotations relevant to AMD pathology were selected, a corrected
P value cut-off (
P = 1.00E-11) was set. If a
P value (
P = 1.00E-12) was set as the cut-off, “Aging,” a biological processes that contributes significantly to AMD pathology,
29–31 would be excluded. The relatively low
P value and higher gene representation made the process particularly relevant to AMD. We found that there were several situations in annotations with a
P value of greater than or equal to 1.00E-10: (1) The annotations related to AMD pathophysiologes that had been selected previously would reappear, and they would not be chosen again; (2) The annotations irrelevant to AMD pathophysiologes, whether they were new or repeated, would not be selected owing to their irrelevance; and (3) There were new annotations related to AMD pathophysiologes with larger
P values and less enriched genes. Nevertheless, the change of
P value from “Response to Hypoxia (
P = 4.05593E-25)” to “Aging (
P = 1.3252E-12)” has gone through 13 orders of magnitude, and
P values of greater than or equal to 1.00E-10 are already small compared with
P = 4.05593E-25 of “Response to hypoxia,” indicating the correlations of these annotations with AMD are relatively weak. To narrow the scope to screen genes, the annotations with a
P value of greater than or equal to 1.00E-10 were not considered. Among the most significantly enriched annotations below the cut-off, we identified 19 biological processes that most related to AMD pathology according to the available literature and research, in which 42 unique genes were contained (
Table 2). The five most enriched biological process annotations were (1) “Response to hypoxia” (
P = 4.05593E-25); (2) “Anti-apoptosis” (
P = 2.12E-17); (3) “Lipopolysaccharide-mediated signaling pathway” (
P = 3.06093E-17); (4) “Signal transduction” (
P = 4.79281E-16); and (5) “Positive regulation of nitric oxide biosynthetic process” (
P = 2.53E-15), containing 18, 14, 9, 9, and 6 genes, respectively. Other enriched biological processes included “Inflammatory response,” “Platelet activation,” “Negative regulation of cell proliferation,” “Blood coagulation,” “Activation of MAPK activity,” “Positive regulation of chemokine biosynthetic process,” “Innate immune response,” “Response to mechanical stimulus,” “Response to glucocorticoid stimulus,” “Positive regulation of apoptotic process,” “Positive regulation of NF [nuclear factor]-kappaB transcription factor activity,” “Humoral immune response,” “Positive regulation of angiogenesis,” and “Aging.”