There are both opportunities and challenges as efforts to characterize genome function grow in scope and scale. The discovery and characterization of eQTLs in these data required careful data modelling to account for confounders and to characterize statistical discovery. We anticipate that complementary analyses with novel methods, enabled by the public availability of these data, may reveal additional insights. Despite the scope of these data, we remain underpowered to detect trans-eQTLs. Larger cohorts of individuals with a smaller number of tissues have yielded hundreds of trans-eGenes4,6,8,9, and we similarly expect trans-eQTL discoveries to increase with additional samples in the final phase of GTEx. Furthermore, some genetic effects may manifest only within a specific cell type, rather than an entire heterogeneous tissue. Both computational and experimental methods, such as deconvolution methods and single-cell sequencing as part of the proposed Human Cell Atlas and related projects, promise to improve resolution to identify precise cell type-specific regulatory effects66. Future aims of the GTEx project include increased sample size, with cis-eQTLs from 53 tissues across 714 donors, now available in the v7 release, and
