Our observations, however, are already informative in the context of previous work. Specifically, we looked for overlap between our candidate genes and those genes listed under the search term ‘asthma’ by the HuGE Navigator Phenopedia, an online database organized by disease that summarizes genetic association studies (http://hugenavigator.net/HuGENavigator/startPagePhenoPedia.do, accessed 02 June 2011; 50). The HuGE Phenopedia database serves as a catalog of genes that were listed in association studies of different diseases. Many genes are included when they are mentioned in relevant publications, regardless of whether an association was identified, replicated or confirmed. As such, inclusion in this database cannot be taken as strong evidence that the genes are indeed associated with asthma. On the other hand, the genes listed in this database are not a random collection either. Accordingly, when we considered only genes detected as expressed in LCLs as the background, we found a significant 2.2-fold enrichment (9.4%; hypergeometric P = 0.008) of our 117 candidate genes listed in the HuGE database as asthma putative candidate genes (the 11 genes listed were: PTGER4, MUC1, IL10RA, TNFRSF25, TNFSF10, CD3E, MST1,
