To distinguish true variants associated with height from other SNPs that could have achieved low P values by chance or confounding effects, and also to collect direct genotype data for associations based on imputed genotypes, we set up a two-stage follow-up strategy (Supplementary Fig. 1 online). In the first stage, we selected 78 SNPs representative of the top association signals (ranked by P values, and taking into account linkage disequilibrium (LD) to minimize redundancy); we then genotyped these 78 SNPs in a panel of European Americans (n = 2,189) ascertained from the near-ends of the normal height distribution (short, 5-10th percentile; tall, 90-95th percentile) (Supplementary Table 2 online). This panel has been used previously to replicate very strongly the HMGA2 rs1042725 association12. To decrease the number of false positives taken into the second stage and retain true associations with height, we selected for further study 29 SNPs that had an odds ratio in the European American panel that was consistent with the direction of the effect observed in the meta-analysis (Methods). We genotyped these SNPs in four large validation (replication)
