We are finding that most trait associations are tissue specific; i.e., they are detected in a handful of tissues. However, we also find that expected tissues given known biology do not necessarily rank among the top enriched tissues. This suggests context specificity of the pathogenic mechanism; specific developmental stage or environmental conditions may be necessary to detect the regulatory event. On the other hand, we are detecting associations in unexpected tissues which suggests a sharing of regulation across multiple tissues/contexts or perhaps novel biology that takes place in these tissues. In either case, agnostic scanning of a broad set of tissues is necessary to discover these mechanisms.
