A systematic analysis of protein-altering exonic variants in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

Genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have identified regions associated with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). GWASs of other diseases have shown an approximately 10-fold overrepresentation of nonsynonymous variants, despite limited exonic coverage on genotyping arrays. We hypothesized that a large-scale analysis of coding variants could discover novel genetic associations with COPD, including rare variants with large effect...