We profiled miRNA expression of 1,146 human miRNAs (based on miRBase 12.05 and additional in-house predictions by Illumina) in subcutaneous gluteal and abdominal adipose tissue from 70 human subjects, using the human Illumina miRNA BeadArray (version 2). A linear mixed-effects model was applied to model the tissue differential expression for each miRNA while correcting for relevant covariates, including metabolic syndrome case-control status (see Materials and Methods). We found 136 (12%) miRNAs to be significantly differentially expressed (FDR-adjusted p-value<0.05) between the gluteal and abdominal fat tissue samples in the primary study (Table S1). Of these, 61 (45%) had higher expression levels in gluteal fat, while 75 (55%) were expressed at higher levels in abdominal fat, indicating a clear difference in the molecular miRNA phenotype in each adipose depot. We also noted that the expression of 19 (14%) of these depot-specific miRNAs (Table S1) have previously been reported to be associated with adipose tissue development, obesity, T2D and metabolic disturbances [12], [13], [15], [21], [22], [23], [24], [25], [26], [27], [28], [29], [30], [31], [32]. Of these, nine miRNAs (hsa-miR-326 [21] ,
