To reduce potential artefacts, fresh samples were collected and processed in a short period of time according to a very strict protocol. Monocytes were obtained from 1,490 unrelated individuals, 730 women and 760 men, aged 35 to 74 years, recruited in the Gutenberg Heart Study (GHS), a community-based project conducted in a single centre in the region of Mainz (Germany) ( Table 1 ). GWE profiles were generated using Illumina Human HT-12 expression BeadChips, and after normalization and filtering out genes undetected in monocytes or non-well characterized (see Materials and Methods), 12,808 expressions traits (averaged over probes) remained for analysis.
