Figure 1. Study workflow: we firstly chose 129 PDGF-related genes from the databases integrated in MSigDB (http://software.broadinstitute.org/gsea/msigdb) and included a total of 22,128 genotyped or imputed SNPs that were located within 2-kb upstream and downstream of those genes in the MDACC dataset; 13 SNPs were found significantly associated with FDR < 0.2 and four intendent SNPs were further chosen to be replicated in the Harvard study; there were two SNPs with consistent, by non-significant, associations with melanoma-specific survival in the Harvard study, and further functional analyses were performed.