In addition, variancePartition gives a strong interpretation to genes whose expression varies across individuals by relating the gene-level results to cis-regulatory variation. For example, the fact that 90.6% of variation in ZNF470 is explained by individual suggests that this variation is driven by genetics, and, in fact, ZNF470 has a cis-eQTL (Fig. 2 e). This observation is also seen genome-wide, as genes with a greater fraction of variation across individuals have a significantly higher probability of having a cis-eQTL detected in this study (Fig. 2 f). This analysis explicitly demonstrates how expression variation across individuals is driven by cis-regulatory variation.
