This large-scale investigation of the transcriptome of monocytes in healthy individuals provides new biological insights into the mechanisms by which gene expression might contribute to disease pathogenesis. In the line of previous studies [1]–[5], we could build a detailed map of cis-regulated eQTLs in monocytes. Even if cell-specific eQTLs exist [53], a large fraction of them are likely to be common to other cell types, and the eQTL map provided here constitutes the most extensive one so far.
