GSDMA, and GSDMB, rs4794820 lies in the promoter of the three genes and is possibly a pleiotropic regulatory variant or, more likely, in LD with such a regulatory element. We observed a concordance between SNPs associated with transcript levels of ORMDL3, GSDMB and GSDMA (Figure 2a). These genes are likely co-regulated, as proposed previously [32], [37]. However, the most compelling eQTL on 17q21 was observed in the association between the asthma susceptibility SNP (rs3859192 – p = 1.11−12 for association with asthma) and the level of expression of GSDMA (P = 3.55×10−151, Figure 2b). In fact, many SNPs on 17q21 were strongly associated with the expression of GSDMA (Figure 2a). Thus our data strongly suggest that the SNPs across this whole locus are associated with asthma because they modulate GSDMA expression in the lung, clearly showing the value of our lung eQTL dataset to refine previous GWAS hits for asthma. It should be noted that correlations between GWAS and eQTL results must be interpreted with caution. Here we related eQTLs in the lung to GWAS studies for asthma which is an airway disease but which is known to involve other tissue types including immune cells. The genetic control of gene
