Here, using data from 5.4 million individuals, we set out to map common genetic associations with adult height, using variants catalogued in the HapMap 3 project (HM3), and to assess the saturation of this map with respect to variants, genomic regions and likely causal genes and gene sets. We identify significant variants, examine signal density across the genome, perform out-of-sample estimation and prediction analyses within studies of individuals of European ancestry and other ancestries and prioritize genes and gene sets as likely mediators of the effects on height. We show that this set of common variants reaches predicted limits for prediction accuracy within populations of European ancestry and largely saturates both the genomic regions associated with height and broad categories of gene sets that are likely to be relevant; future work will be required to extend prediction accuracy to populations of other ancestries, to account for rarer genetic variation and to more definitively connect associated regions with individual probable causal genes and variants.
