Next, GWAS of people who inject drugs vs. controls, revealed an African American-specific association for the intronic SNP rs9829896 in the lysine acetyltransferase gene (KAT2B; P=4.6×10−8, N=3,742), which replicated in an independent dataset (P=0.0016, N=755) [119]. Follow-up analyses in postmortem human PFC implicated rs9829896 as a cis-eQTL SNP, specifically in African Americans, for KAT2B and other genes in KAT2B-containing pathways, including OPRM1 and the CREB binding protein (CREBBP) genes [119] that have been highlighted in prior SNP- or pathway-based analyses of opioid phenotypes [109, 112, 116].
