Genetic risk factors were downloaded from three public repositories: the EBI GWAS Catalog73 (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/gwas/; downloaded 21 November 2016), the NIH GWAS Catalogue and Immunobase (www.immunobase.org; accessed 26 April 2016), applying a significance threshold of P≤5×10−8. Additionally, we added 2,706 genome-wide significant GWAS SNPs from a blood trait GWAS23. SNP coordinates were lifted to hg19 using the liftOver command from R package rtracklayer v1.34.174 and subsequently standardized to match the GIANT 1000G p1v3 ALL reference panel. This yielded 10,562 SNPs (Supplementary Table 4). We tested associations between all risk factors and genes that were at least 5 Mb away to ensure that that they did not tag a cis-eQTL effect. In total, 10,317 trait-associated SNPs were tested in trans-eQTL analyses.
