Identification of single nucleotide polymorphisms regulating peripheral blood mRNA expression with genome-wide significance: an eQTL study in the Japanese population

Several recent studies have reported that expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs) may affect gene expression in a cell-dependent manner. In the current study, a genome-wide eQTL analysis was performed in whole blood samples collected from 76 Japanese subjects. RNA microarray analysis was performed for 3 independent sample groups that were genotyped in a genome-wide scan. The correlations between the genotypes of 534,404 autosomal single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and the expression levels of 30,465 probes were examined for each sample group. The SNP-probe pairs with combined correlation coefficients of all 3 sample groups corresponding to P