Over the last decade, GWAS have been successful in robustly associating genetic loci to human complex traits. However, the mechanistic understanding of these discoveries is still limited, hampering the translation of the associations into actionable targets. Studies of enrichment of expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs) among trait-associated variants1–3 show the importance of gene expression regulation. Functional class quantification showed that 80% of the common variant contribution to phenotype variability in 12 diseases can be attributed to DNAase I hypersensitivity sites, further highlighting the importance of transcript regulation in determining phenotypes4.
