To illustrate the power of the resource we merged these data with SNPs known to be strongly associated with asthma and were able to identify the most likely causal gene variants. Chromosome 17q21 is the most consistent locus associated with asthma [9], [10], [29]–[36]. In the original GWAS study [10], the SNPs associated with asthma in the 17q21 susceptibility locus were also associated with transcript levels of ORMDL3 in lymphoblastoid cell lines, suggesting that ORDML3 was the causal gene. However, more refined analysis of the same samples, exploiting data generated by the 1000 genomes project, suggested that GSDMB, in close proximity to ORMDL3, could be the causal gene [9]. Another eQTL study performed in white blood cell RNA samples suggested that many SNPs in the 17q21 regions are associated with transcript levels of both ORMDL3 and GSDMB [32]. Verlaan et al. [37] showed that SNPs in the region demonstrate domain-wide cis-regulatory effects suggesting long-range chromatin interactions and they found allele-specific differences in nucleosome distribution and binding of the insulator protein CTCF. A recent study also showed that asthma risk alleles
