In the replication stage, SNPs showing nominal association in individual GWAS cohorts (P < 0.05) with the same direction of associations and meta-analysis P value ≤1 × 10−4 were followed up. This strategy would likely identify SNPs that were robust to the heterogeneous phenotype of our cohorts. Sixty SNPs were successfully genotyped in 3,274 subjects from four replication cohorts. The association results of these SNPs with BMI in individual GWAS and replication cohorts are shown in Supplementary Table S1 online. The most significant SNP from the GWAS, rs7791504, was not significant in either individual or combined replication cohorts (P > 0.05, Supplementary Tables S1 and S2 online). However, four SNPs (rs6794092, rs2033195, rs815611, and rs6088887) located on chromosomes 3, 5, and 20, respectively, were nominally associated with BMI (0.004 < P < 0.05) in the meta-analysis of the four replication cohorts (Supplementary Table S2 online). In addition, an excess of association signals (inflation factor = 1.468) was observed in the quantile–quantile plot for the replication cohorts (Supplementary Figures S2 online).
