Several genes on our candidate list may be particularly promising although they may not have previously been implicated as asthma candidate genes. For example, BCL11B, a transcription factor recently identified as a regulator of T cell lineage commitment and T cell identity maintenance (51), has been implicated in a variety of leukemias (52) and a model of inflammatory bowel disease (53), but to our knowledge has not previously been assessed for a role in asthma pathogenesis. The downstream regulatory targets of BCL11B have not yet been globally identified in T cells. A natural follow-up study would therefore be to couple gene expression and chromatin immunoprecipitation-sequencing (ChIP-seq) data to identify potential regulatory differences between asthmatics and healthy controls in primary T cells. Likewise, EZH2, the component of the polycomb group (PcG) responsible for catalyzing histone 3 lysine 27 tri-methylation, a repressive chromatin mark (54), is among our candidate genes. Remarkably, hematopoietic stem cells in the bone marrow of adult mice lacking Ezh2 fail to properly undergo lymphopoiesis (55), suggesting that variation in the basal level of expression of this chromatin modifier
