For the association between rs9315220 and the cluster noted above, several other nearby SNPs (rs9315219, rs9315215, rs7981602, rs4943110) were also significantly associated with this cluster (see Additional File 1), reflecting the high linkage disequilibrium (LD) among them (the pairwise r2 across all five SNPs ranged from 0.92 to 0.96 in these 52 samples). The smallest q-value was nearest to the STARD13 locus (q-value = 1.13 × 10-4). Another strong association (q = 5.40 × 10-4) shown in Figure 2 was between the intronic SNP rs2296697 in LPHN2 (latrophilin 2) and a cluster of genes including C21orf58, CPNE6, SOX11, MMP8, LRTM1, and one unannotated gene. The genes within this cluster have established roles in Ca2+-dependent signaling and cancer [37-41] (Discussion). Interestingly, a conventional trans-eQTL analysis between the SNPs and individual expression values of these co-regulated genes did not detect any associations (see Table 1); these results were typical of other clusters (data not shown).
