Figure 2. . Control versus maternal separation: correlated miRNA–miRNA expression dendrograms and heat maps across three brain regions.

Significantly altered MS main effect miRNAs across the prefrontal cortex, amygdala and hippocampus were included in correlation and hierarchical clustering analysis. R was used to cluster using the DIANA algorithm. Clustering was limited to k = 3 clusters. (A & B) Correlation heat maps for (A) controls and (B) maternal separation animals show disparate patterns of miRNA–miRNA correlation across the brain; each of the three clusters is marked by a colored square on the dendrogram and height is an arbitrary unit estimating the distance between different clusters. Significantly correlated miRNAs (false discovery rate <0.05) were narrowed to only include miRNA correlations between brain regions rather than within a single brain region. (C & D) miRNA–miRNA correlation network figures were created for (C) controls and (D) MS animals. Positive correlations are shown in red and negative correlations in blue; thicker lines indicate a more significant correlation.