pathway. Because this inflation can be a source of false positive results for terms including clusters of genes, we re-executed the ALIGATOR method collapsing all physically proximal genes in the same category into a single entity. The GO terms representing the cholinergic receptor genes remained significant (category-specific p-value <0.05) after this correction (Table S5) for the OZALC-NAG, the SAGE and the ARIC studies. Similarly the GO term GO:0004984 “olfactory receptor activity” remained significant in the three studies, but the other two sensory perception GO terms were not consistently significant (Table S5).
