For FEV1, genome-wide significant associations were observed for 46 chromosome 4q24 SNPs in or near four adjacent genes (Supplementary Table 4). The SNP with the smallest P value, rs17331332 (P=4.00×10−10), is located near NPNT. The 45 other significantly associated SNPs include four SNPs located near the 5’-end of NPNT, five SNPs located in INTS12 or near its 3’-end, seven SNPs located in FLJ20184 or near its 3’-end, and 29 SNPs located in GSTCD. FLJ20184 encodes a hypothetical protein according to several genome browsers including the UCSC genome browser15, but there is no approved HUGO gene name for this locus16. The SNP rs17331332 is correlated at r2>0.5 with most other significantly associated SNPs in this region (Fig. 3), suggesting that the associations in the four adjacent genes represent one independent finding. The significantly associated SNPs had MAFs between 6 and 8%. The absolute β values (per-allele change in FEV1) ranged from 55.92 to 71.43 mL (Supplementary Table 4), and the β directions were consistent across the CHARGE cohorts for all 46 genome-wide significant SNPs (Supplementary Table 3 for rs17331332). Among these 46 SNPs, 39 were associated with FEV1 at genome-wide significance among ever smokers (Supplementary Table 4).
