To validate potential associations with BMI, we designed a pool of 35 variants for further genotyping, drawn from among the most strongly associated independent loci (for technical reasons, these SNPs do not correspond perfectly to the top 35 loci; see Methods). We genotyped these SNPs in up to 45,018 additional individuals of European ancestry from nine stage 2 samples (Supplementary Fig. 1, Supplementary Tables 1 and 4 and Supplementary Note online). We also obtained in silico association results for these SNPs from five BMI GWAS on 14,064 additional individuals of European ancestry (Supplementary Fig. 1, Supplementary Tables 1 and 4 and Supplementary Note). Meta-analysis of these stage 2 results combined with stage 1 data revealed SNPs from five previously unreported loci near TMEM18, KCTD15, SH2B1, MTCH2 and GNPDA2 that are strongly associated with BMI (P < 5 × 10−8; Table 1, Fig. 2 and Supplementary Table 5 online). Two additional loci, represented by rs2815752 (near NEGR1) and rs10769908 (near STK33) had supporting evidence in stage 2 samples but did not reach the P < 5 × 10−8 threshold (P =
