1, Fig. 2 and Supplementary Table 5 online). Two additional loci, represented by rs2815752 (near NEGR1) and rs10769908 (near STK33) had supporting evidence in stage 2 samples but did not reach the P < 5 × 10−8 threshold (P = 6.0 × 10−8 and P = 1.3 × 10−6, respectively). Among these two, rs2815752 also showed a highly significant independent association with severe obesity in a pediatric cohort (P = 2.2 × 10−7; Supplementary Table 6 online), strongly suggesting that this variant represents a sixth newly discovered locus influencing BMI. For each of the six loci, multiple SNPs showed highly significant association in the stage 1 data (Fig. 2), and the associations were observed across multiple cohorts genotyped on different platforms (Supplementary Table 7 online), suggesting that idiosyncratic genotyping artifacts are unlikely to explain our results. Furthermore, the consistent association signals across different European-ancestry samples, each with low genomic control inflation factors (Supplementary Table 3), also suggest that population structure is unlikely to account for these associations. Finally, five of the six associated variants (near TMEM18, KCTD15, SH2B1, MTCH2 and NEGR1, but not GNPDA2) had Illumina proxies in high LD (r2 > 0.66) with our best SNPs that were included
