Considering this, the discovery of genetic variants that have a functional impact on gene expression is a potentially powerful means to facilitate more accurate and robust identification of associations between variants and disease. Such discoveries may also provide mechanistic insight into otherwise anonymous genotype-phenotype correlations that often span many correlated variants across multiple genes. In large part due to this potential there has been recent substantial interest in the identification of expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs) [3]–[10].
