We analyzed peripheral blood which is a mixture of different hematopoetic cell types. In addition, we also assessed whether the identified trait-associated trans-eQTLs (detected at FDR 0.05) could be replicated in a single cell-type dataset. This is an important question, as it is potentially possible that the trans-acting SNP are able to alter the amount, volume or ratio of certain blood cell types, which might as a consequence result in an indirect net effect on the measured gene expression levels within the mix of the cells that comprise whole blood.
