Expression quantitative trait loci of primary melanocytes facilitate identification of melanoma susceptibility genes

eQTL is a powerful method to detect genotype-expression correlation. To be able to identify the genes whose expression levels are correlated with germline genetic variants including the ones associated with melanoma, eQTL analysis was performed in 106 primary melanocyte cultrures To perform eQTL analysis, We obtained frozen aliquots of melanocytes isolated from foreskin of 106 healthy newborn males who are mainly of European descent following an established protocol (Halaban et al. 2000) from SPORE in Skin Cancer Specimen Resource Core at Yale University. Cells were grown in Dermal Cell Basal Medium supplemented with Melanocyte Growth Kit. DNA was extracted following the protocol described below and genotypes were detected using Illumina Infinium OmniEpress array