if it was associated with at least one gene in one sample type at a false discovery rate (FDR) < 5%. Any gene with at least one genome-wide significant cis-eQTL SNP was considered an eGene in this study. Additionally, we further investigated a total of 7,240 genome-wide significant SNPs that were previously reported to be associated with one or more blood lipid traits (Global Lipids Genetics Consortium, 2013); the results in GRCh37/hg19 annotations were downloaded from the GLGC website. In this study, these loci were referred to as the GLGC loci. We included all SNPs and genes with TSSs within 1 Mb of each sentinel GLGC SNP and used four genotype-based PCs as covariates in the linear model implemented in Matrix eQTL (Shabalin, 2012) as described above to estimate the effects of these SNPs.
