The strongest association signal seen in this gene cluster in European ancestry populations is represented by a group of 52 correlated variants, including rs16969968, which we call bin A. Due to these high correlations, the ability to statistically refine the association between smoking and these SNPs is very limited when using only European ancestry subjects. However, the LD structure between these 52 variants breaks down into 20 sub-bins in Asians and 38 sub-bins in African Americans.
