Following the publication of the above article, the authors have realized that the Materials and methods section and Figs. 1, 3 and 4 contained certain errors. In the Materials and methods section, the high glucose concentration was reported incorrectly as being 25 mmol/l; this should have been stated as 15 mmol/l. Furthermore, the normal concentration of glucose should have been reported as 5 mmol/l rather than  5.5 mmol, and the glucose concentration gradient should have been written as 0, 5, 10, and 15 mmol/l, and not as 0, 5, 10, and 25 mmol/l. Secondly, the authors have corrected some miscalculations associated with the bar charts featured in Figs. 1, 3, and 4, and the revised versions of these figures are shown here. All these corrections were approved by all authors. The authors regret that these errors were included in the paper, even though they did not substantially alter any of the major conclusions reported in the study, and apologize to the readership for any inconvenience caused. [the original article was published in Molecular Medicine Reports 17: 8536‑8541, 2018; DOI: 10.3892/mmr.2018.8914].