As replication is considered the gold standard in confirming association results, we also sought to replicate our findings in another asthma study. To do so, we analyzed results from the EVE study, an independent meta-analysis of asthma GWAS in North American subjects of diverse ethnicities (32). Following the same approach as that outlined for the analysis of the GABRIEL data set, we were again able to reject the null hypothesis that asthma GWAS P-values for variants classified as cis eQTL for the 117 candidate genes were drawn from the genome-wide null distribution (by permutation, P = 0.027; Fig. 5). The independent replication of our results serves as strong evidence that at least a subset of these candidate genes plays an important role in asthma risk.
