intron of S100B. This gene is thought to play a role in inflammatory responses and is secreted by activated T lymphocytes (30). These observations suggest that our GWAS approach is underpowered to identify loci with key roles in determining variation in lymphocyte counts. While hypotheses could be constructed for the relevance of many genes with marginally significant association signals (Supplementary Material, Table S2), the fact that we found no association at a genome-wide significance level makes it unappealing to pursue these hypotheses based on the GWAS data alone.
