It has now been widely observed that GWAS findings only infrequently implicate the “usual suspects.” In other words, when GWAS identifies a high-confidence and replicated finding, the loci implicated often point in a novel direction and these new leads can then become targeted priorities for more mechanistically oriented experimental work. While the holy grail of GWAS may be the identification of a strongly associated risk allele, as more associations emerge from GWAS and other genomic approaches and these findings are replicated, even apparently modest risk alleles may point us towards relevant biological pathways and networks.
