PFC and NAc tissues from 41 AD cases and 41 controls were provided by the New South Wales Tissue Resource Centre. Age, sex, ethnicity, brain weight, brain pH, post-mortem interval (PMI), tissue hemisphere, cause of death, blood toxicology, smoking status, neuropathology and liver pathology were provided for each subject. Confounding effects of all these covariates were controlled by analysis of covariance (ANCOVA, Supplementary Table S7). Total RNA was isolated from 100mg frozen tissue using the mirVana-PARIS kit (Life Technologies, Carlsbad, CA) following manufacturer’s protocols. RNA concentration was measured using the Quant-iT Broad Range RNA Assay kit (Life Technologies). The RNA Integrity Number (RIN) was measured on the Agilent 2100 Bioanalyzer (Agilent Technologies, Inc., Santa Clara, CA). Quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) analyses were performed as previously described using SYBR Green (Riley et al., 2010) with primers spanning the LOC339975 exon 2–3 junction. Samples with missing genotypes and outliers (±2SD from the mean) were omitted from further analysis.
