We performed family-based association analyses in up to 2,563 German Caucasian individuals from 761 families. The analyses indicated some evidence for transmission disequilibrium for the investigated markers in particular for the G-allele of rs8111428 (p-value = 0.0016) and the A-allele of rs2302382 (p-value = 0.0089), both minor alleles (Table 2). In addition, for the non-synonymous SNP rs1800437, we observed a trend for the G-allele (major allele) to be more frequently transmitted to the obese offspring (p = 0.076; Table 2). To explore if a single SNP or a haplotype was involved in obesity we further analysed haplotype structure in the gene region using the CEU population data from the International HapMap Project [34] captured by Haploview software [35] (solid spine algorithm). There are two regions of increased between-marker LD (Figure 1). The first covers 24 kb and the second 5 kb. For the two markers showing the strongest signals in our study, rs8111428 and rs2302382, there are no direct HapMap data available. However, their physical positions indicate that they could be part of the first haplotype block, as confirmed when
