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 in an independent GWAS by Thorleifsson et al.12; for all five, they observed confirmatory evidence of association with BMI (Table 1), providing strong validation of these newly discovered associations.
