To provide additional data on where these genes may function, we measured the expression of the genes nearest to our best SNP association signals in a panel of different human tissues. We found that, in our data, all genes except MTCH2 were highly expressed in the brain and/or hypothalamus (Supplementary Fig. 3 online). Additionally, MTCH2 mRNA expression is observed in the brain in publicly available expression data27, and in these data, variant rs17788930 (r2 = 1 with lead SNP rs10838738) was associated (P = 1.3 × 10−6) with MTCH2 mRNA levels (Supplementary Table 8). These expression data suggest that, as is seen in monogenic forms of obesity, inherited variation influences common human obesity through effects in the CNS, although effects in other tissues for at least some of these genes remain possible.
