A key attribute of this study is the combination of a large, single discovery sample with standardized BP measurement and dense 1000 Genomes/UK10K imputation, yielding a high quality dataset with ˜9.8 million variants14, taking advantage of major international consortia for parallel replication of common and low-frequency variants. In total we include GWAS data from 330,956 individuals and exonic SNVs from a total of 422,604 individuals. This strategy resulted in 107 robustly validated loci for BP traits, including 32 loci that have not previously been reported, and at least 53 further loci validated for the first time. Despite its size, our study is still under-powered to find low-frequency variants. Our findings are mostly common variants, with similarly modest effect sizes as variants previously reported at the time of analysis (Supplementary Fig. 14). The lack of rare variant discovery could also be due to the challenge of detecting rare variants from imputed data. There may be greater potential for identifying rare variants from the future release of genetic data for all 500,000 UK Biobank participants.
