Quality Threshold (QT) clustering was used to identify a gene cluster from the acute binge alcohol exposure treatment group that would describe and identify the molecular changes occurring in bone before measurable bone damage had occurred. The criteria established for an early binge alcohol-related bone damage signature were: 1. The included genes were only differentially expressed in bone after acute binge alcohol treatment (before bone damage was observed). 2. The included genes were also not differentially expressed after chronic binge alcohol treatment. We identified a composite QT cluster pattern consistent with these criteria, comprised of 605 annotated genes (Table S3, Supplemental data). A subset of this signature containing 74 genes exhibiting 2-fold or greater differential expression is depicted as a heat map of control versus acute binge alcohol samples in Fig. 5.
