At six of the loci, the WHR-associated SNP was either the strongest SNP associated with significant (P < 1.0 × 10−5) expression of a local (within 1 Mb) gene transcript or explained the majority of the association between the most significant eQTL SNP and the gene transcript in conditional analyses (adjusted P > 0.05; Table 4). For example, the WHR-associated SNP rs1011731 (near DNM3-PIGC) was strongly-associated with expression of PIGC in lymphocytes (P = 5.9 × 10−10); furthermore, rs1011731 is in high LD (r2 = 1.00, D’ = 1.00, HapMap CEU) with the SNP with the strongest effect on PIGC expression (rs991790), and this cis-eQTL association is abolished by conditioning on rs1011731. These analyses therefore indicate that these two signals are coincident and that PIGC is a strong candidate for mediating the WHR-association at rs1011731. We found similar evidence for coincidence of the WHR signal with expression for rs984222 (TBX15 in omental fat), rs1055144 (expressed sequence tag AA553656 in SAT), rs10195252 (GRB14 in SAT), rs4823006 (ZNRF3 in SAT and omental fat), and rs6784615 (STAB1 in blood)(Table 4). Taken together, the
