Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio

A Search for QPOs in the Blazar OJ287: Preliminary Results from the 2015/2016 Observing Campaign

We analyse the light curve in the R band of the blazar OJ287, gathered during the 2015/2016 observing season. We did a search for quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs) using several methods over a wide range of timescales. No statistically significant periods were found in the high-frequency domain both in the ground-based data and in Kepler observations. In the longer-period domain, the Lomb–Scargle periodogram revealed several peaks above the 99% significance level. The longest one—about 95 days—corresponds to the innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO) period of the more massive black hole. The 43-day period could be an alias, or it can be attributed to accretion in the form of a two-armed spiral wave.Peer reviewe