SNPs were assigned to genes if they were located within the genomic sequence corresponding to the start of the first and the end of the last exon of any transcript corresponding to that gene. Functional elements are not restricted to this region but we used this since any other definition is arbitrary. The chromosome and location for all currently known human SNPs and genes and their identifiers was taken from the human genome assembly build 36.2 of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) database. All known SNPs and their corresponding chromosomal locations were obtained from the Chromosome Reports data for Taxonomic ID 9606 (i.e. humans) available from NCBI’s dbSNP. These data were downloaded for chromosomes 1 to 22 providing information on RefSNPs and chromosome coordinates. The second data source (seq_gene.md) was also downloaded from the NCBI’s Genome database giving information on Gene ID, gene names, and their start and end position on a chromosome. For the purpose of identification of SNPs in genes we mapped all the SNPs to genes defined by the start and end positions using database
