About the Authors

Maha Saber-Ayad

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Methodology, Supervision, Visualization, Writing – original draft

msaber@sharjah.ac.ae (MS); rhamoudi@sharjah.ac.ae (RH)

Affiliations College of Medicine, University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE, Research Institute for Medical and Health Sciences, University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE, College of Medicine, Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt

Shaista Manzoor

Roles Methodology, Validation

Affiliations College of Medicine, University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE, Research Institute for Medical and Health Sciences, University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE

Hadia Radwan

Roles Data curation, Software, Writing – review & editing

Affiliations College of Medicine, University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE, Research Institute for Medical and Health Sciences, University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE, Clinical Nutrition and Dietetics Department, College of Health Sciences, University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE

Sarah Hammoudeh

Roles Methodology, Validation, Visualization

Affiliations College of Medicine, University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE, Research Institute for Medical and Health Sciences, University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE

Rahaf Wardeh

Roles Investigation, Project administration

Affiliation College of Medicine, University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE

Ahmed Ashraf

Roles Data curation, Investigation, Visualization

Affiliation College of Medicine, University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE

Hussein Jabbar

Roles Data curation, Investigation, Methodology

Affiliation College of Medicine, University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE

Rifat Hamoudi

Roles Formal analysis, Validation, Writing – review & editing

msaber@sharjah.ac.ae (MS); rhamoudi@sharjah.ac.ae (RH)

Affiliations College of Medicine, University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE, Research Institute for Medical and Health Sciences, University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE

Competing Interests

The authors declare that they also received funding from a [Boehringer Ingelheim] as a students’ grant to train the students in the molecular biology and genetics lab. The grant supported purchasing some consumables for this task. It is not related by any means to employment, consultancy, patents, products in development, marketed products, etc. We hereby confirm that this does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.