One of the drawbacks of GWAS is the reliance on a large number of statistical tests, which puts the threshold for significance at an extremely low level thereby increasing the chance of missing real associations. Given that asthma is a pulmonary disorder it is reasonable to assume that important molecular drivers are expressed in lung tissue. Therefore, instead of filtering primarily by P values to identify loci/genes that explain asthma, we filtered the loci in the GABRIEL [9] dataset by their status as a cis acting eSNP. Specifically, all SNPs from the GABRIEL study associated with asthma with P<0.01 were translated into genes via our lung eSNP list. A total of 7,613 SNPs were linked to the expression of 739 unique genes.
