The authors wish to thank Steve Horvath, Desmond Smith, Xia Yang, Sudheer Doss, Anatole Ghazalpour, Pek Lum, and John Lamb for valuable discussions and insights. We thank Leslie Ingram-Drake for work on data preparation. Initial work on construction of the BXH.ApoE−/− cross was done by Weibin Shi. Author contributions. SW, TAD, and AJL conceived and designed the experiments. SW, NY, and EES performed the experiments. SW, NY, HW, and TAD analyzed the data. EES and HW contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools. HW designed script and code to analyze data. SW, NY, EES, TAD, and AJL wrote the paper.
Funding. Work was supported in part by National Institutes of Health grants HL-30568 and HL-28481 to AJL, Public Health Services Training Grant HD07228–24 to SW, the Iris Cantor-UCLA Women's Health Center, UCLA National Center for Excellence in Women's Health Grant to TAD, and by an American Heart Association Medical Student Research Grant to NY.
Competing interests. The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Abbreviations
ApoE−/− apolipoprotein E null
cQTL clinical QTL
eQTL gene expression QTL
FDR false discovery rate
LOD logarithm of odds
mlratio mean log10 ratio
QTL quantitative trait locus
ROC receiver operating characteristic
SNP single nucleotide polymorphism