The purpose of this meta-analysis is to determine if bins A, B, C, and D show consistent association with smoking behavior across populations and, if so, to leverage these differences in genetic correlation across populations to refine the genetic associations in this region previously reported in subjects of European ancestry. We expect a sub-bin showing consistent evidence across all three populations to be more likely to contain a variant altering a biological mechanism. We performed meta-analyses of results from a total of 27 datasets: nine European ancestry samples (used to evaluate consistency with previous results), seven Asian samples, and eleven African American samples. We tested for association between smoking phenotypes and the four distinct bins (A through D) across all three populations. This cross-population study therefore improves our understanding of genetic risk for smoking by highlighting potentially functional variants.
