To determine the general functional characteristics of the miRNA-related activity in each adipose tissue type, we looked at miRNAs that were significantly associated with their mRNA targets, and tested whether or not there was an enrichment of specific KEGG [39] terms in each tissue. The analyses included the 248 miRNAs with predicted conserved mRNA targets based on Target Scan, using the same set of miRNAs included in the miRNA-mRNA GSE analysis (see previous section). For each miRNA that had a significant association with its set of mRNA targets (based on the gene set enrichment test), the KEGG terms were extracted for all of its mRNA targets. KEGG terms were aggregated across the significant miRNA-mRNA sets separately for each tissue. We then applied Fisher's exact test to assess if any of the KEGG terms were enriched in these candidate sets of KEGG terms (see Materials and Methods). The analysis revealed an enrichment of 43 KEGG terms in abdominal adipose tissue (Table S9), and 33 in gluteal adipose tissue (Table S10) (FDR adjusted p-value<0.05). We found that 32 of the KEGG terms
