The biological roles of ASB16-AS1 in bone metabolism are not well known. WGCNA is a useful system genomics method to construct gene co-expression network and predict functional connections (thus potential functional mechanisms) between novel genes and known genes. After excluding non-expressed genes, we selected 3593 probes representing 3593 genes (~75% of the nominally significant GWAS geneset which contains 4796 genes). After hierarchical clustering and dynamic tree cutting, we chose the gene modules which contained ASB16-AS1 gene. Using Cytoscape, we visualized the gene centered co-expression network, respectively (Fig. 4). The network only showed genes which were shown to be associated with BMD in the previous studies and connected to the centered gene with a TOM > 0.15. With this criterion, there were 45 known genes co-expressed with ASB16-AS1 (Fig. 4). CTNNB1 positively co-expressed with ASB16-AS1, while TNFSF11 (cor = −0.43) was negatively co-expressed with ASB16-AS1.
