Expression profiling of the samples, each with either two or three technical replicates, were performed using the Illumina Human HT-12 V3 BeadChips (Illumina Inc) including 48,804 probes where 200ng of total RNA was processed according to the protocol supplied by Illumina. All samples were randomized prior to array hybridization and the replicates were hybridized on different beadchips. Raw data was imported to the Illumina Beadstudio software and probes with less than three beads present were excluded. Log2-transformed expression signals were normalized separately per tissue with quantile normalization of the replicates of each individual followed by quantile normalization across all individuals as previously described 11. We acknowledge that quantile normalization does not adjust for shared covariance due to technical factors which may influence subsequent analysis but previous efforts 5 indicate that the impact on the result seems to be minor. Post-QC expression profiles were obtained for 825 (adipose and LCL) and 705 (skin) individuals, respectively. The Illumina probe annotations were cross-checked by mapping the probe sequence to the NCBI Build 36 genome with MAQ 31. Only uniquely mapping probes with no
