Figure 1

Design of the study. The gene expression data come from two studies performed in parallel in the laboratory: GEXEM and miRNEM. Large scale mRNA expression and miRNA expression have been measured on RNA isolated from peripheral blood leukocytes using, respectively, the Human Gene 1.0 ST and the miRNA 1.0 arrays by Affymetrix. The removal of some samples for quality control issues and the filtering of genes have yielded a matrix with gene expression data from 65 samples and 7564 genes (1113 ncRNAs and 6451 mRNAs). Pearson’s R has been computed between all pairs of genes and, after thresholding (through the elimination all mRNA – mRNA and ncRNA – ncRNA correlations and the correlations below a threshold │R│), the resulting network has been visualized in Cytoscape.