As many of the 32 BMI loci harbor multiple genes, we examined whether gene expression (eQTL) analyses could also direct us to positional candidates. Gene expression data were available for human brain, lymphocytes, blood, subcutaneous and visceral adipose tissue, and liver34–36 (Online Methods, Table 1 and Supplementary Table 7). Significant cis-associations, defined at the tissue-specific level, were observed between 14 BMI-associated alleles and expression levels (Table 1 and Supplementary Table 7). In several cases, the BMI-associated SNP was the most significant SNP or explained a substantial proportion of the association with the most significant SNP for the gene transcript in conditional analyses (Padj>0.05). These significant associations included NEGR1, ZC3H4, TMEM160, MTCH2, NDUFS3, GTF3A, ADCY3, APOB48R, SH2B1, TUFM, GPRC5B, IQCK, SLC39A8, SULT1A1, and SULT1A2 (Table 1 and Supplementary Table 7), making these genes higher priority candidates within the associated loci. However, we note that some BMI-associated variants were correlated with the expression of multiple nearby genes, making it difficult to determine the most relevant gene.
