for height and vWF, and less so for BMI and QTi, that genic regions proportionally explain more variation than intergenic regions (legends of Fig. 2 and Supplementary Fig. 6). As an example we consider the case of genes ± 20 Kb where genic and intergenic coverages are roughly equal (49.4% vs. 50.6%). The estimates of hGg2 vs. hGi2 are 32.8% vs. 12.6% (P = 2.1×10−10) for height, 22.7% vs. 4.0% (P = 5.1×10−4) for vWF, 11.7% vs. 4.7% (P = 0.022) for BMI and 13.5% vs. 7.5% (P = 0.251) for QTi. We further partitioned the genetic variance onto the genic and intergenic regions of each chromosome (Online Methods). In general, the results agree with that of the whole-genome partitioning analysis, in that the genic regions proportionally explained more variation (Fig. 2 and Supplementary Fig. 6). The variance attributable to chromosome 9 for vWF is dominated by the genic regions, which is expected because the ABO gene on this chromosome explains ~10% of its variance16. However, there appear to be exceptions, for example, the intergenic regions of chromosome 2 and chromosome 5 seemed to be more important for BMI and QTi, respectively. These results are not conclusive because the standard
