To explore the tissue specificity of eQTLs, we analyzed expression in brain and blood using SNPs abstracted from the NHGRI catalog of GWAS. We specifically wanted to address whether it is necessary to examine brain tissue to detect eQTLs for brain traits, including neurological diseases and psychiatric events, or whether the same information could be obtained from a more accessible tissue such as blood. We find that while many eQTLs are shared between blood and brain, there are specific instances, not always simply related to tissue specific gene expression levels, where the tissue studied limits detection of eQTLs.
