Our efforts to use pathway- and literature-mining approaches to look for functional enrichment of the genes mapping to associated regions met with only limited success, but did provide some support for overrepresentation of developmental processes. Developmental genes have been implicated in fat accumulation and distribution45,46, and recent evidence supports a link between developmental genes and body fat distribution, including HOXC1347 and TBX1545,48. Developmental genes may in part determine the adipocyte-specific expression patterns that have been observed in different fat depots45. Taken together, our findings point to a set of genes influencing body fat distribution that have their principal effects in adipose tissue. This is in contrast to the predominantly central (hypothalamic) processes that are involved in the regulation of body mass index and overall adiposity49.
