The strongest regulatory loci for creQTL (q = 5.50 × 10-4) are shown in Table 2. We calculated pairwise r2 between all 453 SNPs from creQTLs with q < 0.005 and eliminated those with r2 values above 0.5, leaving 338 creQTLs. Of the 338 SNPs remaining, 190 were in noncoding regions; 145 were intronic; two were in coding sequences; and one was in the 3' untranslated region. Interestingly, many of the associated creQTLs contained SNPs in noncoding sequences >500 kb from the nearest gene. After assigning the 68,523 SNPs to 8,398 protein-coding genes in cis (Methods), we plotted the resulting 8,398 q-values versus cis-location relative to the nearest gene in Figure 4. Consistent with the pattern for the highest-scoring hits at q < 0.005, associations appeared most enriched in the intronic regions, and within the non-intronic, noncoding regions, significant associations appeared most in regions >10 KB away from the coding sequence.
