Chunk #17 — Results — Total CHRNA5 mRNA level in frontal cortex is strongly associated with variants located upstream of the gene in individuals of both African and European ancestry
To further investigate eQTLs within and flanking the CHRNA5 gene, we genotyped twenty additional SNPs including 2 variants (rs601079, rs615470) that are associated with CHRNA5 total mRNA expression levels in brain tissues of European ancestry reported in our previous study [20], 5 tag SNPs (rs55853698, rs16969968, rs578776, rs3743078, rs6495308) from different LD bins in the CHRNA5-A3-B4 gene cluster [19], and 12 SNPs highly correlated with rs880395 in the European population (r2 = 0.9). The linear regression results with postmortem interval as a covariate showed that the most significant variants associated with altered mRNA expression levels are located upstream of the CHRNA5 transcript (Table 1).
