Because we did not detect a functional effect for rs1159918, its association with alcoholism could either be due to functional effects in other tissues or through linkage disequilibrium (LD) with another SNP that is functional. In the CEU population, rs1159918 is reported to be in high LD with rs6810842 (r2 = 0.949), but rs6810842 also doesn’t appear to have an effect on promoter activity (Table 3); the two SNPs are in different phase in 1 of the 5 haplotypes we tested. There are other SNPs in the ADH cluster which are in LD (r2 >0.25) with rs1159918 but have not been tested for function.
