To replicate our results, we repeated the experiment and analysis in gluteal and abdominal adipose tissue from 40 additional human subjects (28 healthy controls and 12 metabolic syndrome cases), not part of the original study (see Materials and Methods), and only considered miRNAs that were found to be significant in the primary study. Of the 136 miRNAs found to be significantly differentially expressed in the primary study, 59 (44%) were also significantly differentially expressed in the replication study (p-value<0.05 and directionally consistent effect) ( Figure 1 , see Table S1 for detailed results). When we compared the effect sizes across both the primary and replication studies, we observed a high degree of overall concordance (Pearson correlation coefficient = 0.86) between the coefficients (Figure S2), indicating a high level of agreement between the two studies, even among miRNAs that did not meet the p-value criterion for achieving replication. Seven of the miRNAs that were differentially expressed in both studies, have previously been reported to play a role in tissue development, obesity, T2D and metabolic disturbances (hsa-miR-34a [23] , [32] , hsa-miR-28-5p [32] , hsa-miR-27b [13] , [15] , hsa-miR-326 [21] , hsa-miR-204 [22] , [23] , hsa-miR-195 [32] , hsa-miR-519d [29]).
