To do so, we used Illumina HT-12 microarrays to interrogate the expression level of 11 282 autosomal genes in RNA samples from 96 Hutterite-derived LCLs (see Materials and Methods for quality control and data processing steps and Supplementary Material, Table S1 for the gene expression estimates for all samples; one sample failed quality control, thus subsequent analysis was performed with 95 individuals). To maximize the power of the study given the sample size, we chose individuals from the two extreme tails of the Hutterite lymphocyte count distribution (Fig. 3). The samples we chose from each tail of the distribution were balanced with respect to gender (24 males and 24 females chosen from each tail), age (mean age is 35.9 ± 8.3 and 35.0 ± 8.8 in samples chosen from each tail, respectively) and relatedness (median kinship coefficient of samples from each tail is 0.036).
