Fig. 1

Analytical pipeline to identify miRNA-mediated netowrks associated with alcohol-related phenotypes. The various steps in the flowchart are a Select triplets for which all 3 variables are strongly correlated (p<10⁻³) with each other; b Select quadruples for which the phenotype is significantly associated (p<0.05) with each of the 3 components of a chosen ‘cohesive’ triplet; c Bayesian Network Analysis separately for each quadruple: Select the quadruple for next step if the best network using the quadruple has a miRNA mediating the effect of the SNP on the phenotype (See details in Fig. 2); d Advanced Bayesian networks: miRNAs and genes that were associated with the same phenotype and an SDP from the same region of the genome were combined into larger networks