Fig. 6.

Summary of strategies to identify causal variants and disease mechanisms. GWAS association signals can be followed up by meta-analysis and/or fine-mapping to identify specific causal variants. Pathway and eQTL analyses can be applied to prioritize the causative genes and to generate hypotheses to explain the biological link between a causal gene and disease. Identified causal variants and genes can in turn be followed up by experiments by, for instance, ex vivo stimulation experiments using human or animal immune cells or by experiments with inflammation models in whole animals