Non-potluck post from The American Journal of Human Genetics: A Large-Scale Multi-ancestry Genome-wide Study Accounting for Smoking Behavior Identifies Multiple Significant Loci for Blood Pressure

In this paper, the authors wanted to identify BP loci accounting for smoking behavior. They performed genome-wide association meta-analyses of BP in 610,091 individuals from different ancestries incorporating gene-smoking interactions. The analysis was done in two stages: the first stage examined approximately 18.8 million SNPs in 129,913 individuals from four ancestries, and the second stage in 480,178 additional individuals from five ancestries. In addition to 56 already known BP loci, they identified 15 genome-wide significant loci in stage 1 that replicated in stage 2. When they ran a combined stage 1 and 2 meta-analysis, they identified 66 additional loci that were genome-wide significant. Among the new identified loci, ten showed significant interaction with smoking habit, suggesting a strong evidence of shared pathophysiology with cardio-metabolic and addiction traits.

Link: https://ac.els-cdn.com/S000292971830017X/1-s2.0-S000292971830017X-main.pdf?_tid=311e03a0-f434-44a2-8d65-daec1179fd10&acdnat=1523641133_f435a941cae453ab3c7e571491265794

-Sylvain

Third post from The American Journal of Human Genetics