As these rat QTLs also include the genomic locus of Pde5a, which is capable of modulating acute and chronic cardiac stress responses [ 50, 51], represented by rs13477379 in our study, it makes this gene an interesting additional candidate, although not included in the region of strongest linkage.
Due to its antiviral properties in vitro [11] silymarin had been considered a promising additional candidate for the treatment of acute infection with HBV and HCV.
None of the above threshold hits appeared to be false positive identifications, and a few additional candidate sequences were extracted by manual inspection of the below threshold sequences retrieved by the search.
We demonstrated that once the functional consequence of a common variant has been clearly elucidated, this knowledge can be reapplied to provide proof of a role for additional candidate rare variants at the same locus.
All three are predicted to encode one or more transmembrane domains, and orf387 is a particularly likely additional candidate because it includes portions of atp6 (table 4; fig. 4 B ).
