The DNA samples of 228 GENRES study subjects were successfully genotyped (success rates >99%) at the Institute for Molecular Medicine Technology Centre, University of Helsinki using the Illumina HumanOmniExpress‐12 BeadChip (Illumina, Inc, San Diego, CA). The genotypes (NCBI build 37, hg19) were called and quality controlled using GenomeStudio v. 2011.1 software (Illumina, Inc) and in‐house‐developed database tools. Further quality steps, including identity‐by‐state clustering and gender check, were performed using Plink software and PLINK v1.07 toolset.20 (link) Of the total of 709 357 genotyped autosomal SNPs, 707 658 passed these quality‐control steps. After this, SNPs with Hardy‐Weinberg equilibrium P value <1×10−5 (393 SNPs) and minor allele frequency <0.01 (75 421 SNPs) were excluded, which resulted in 631 844 autosomal SNPs that were used for analysis.
DNA samples from PEAR were genotyped using Illumina Human Omni1‐Quad BeadChip (Illumina) as previously described.11 (link) DNA samples from GERA I and II study participants were genotyped using the Affymetrix GeneChip Human Mapping 6.0 Array Sets.10 (link)–11 (link) SOPHIA samples were genotyped using the Illumina Human1M‐Duo array (Illumina) and imputed using MACH software and the HapMap CEU haplotypes (release 22) as reference.