Post genome-wide association studies functional characterization of prostate cancer risk loci

Background Over the last decade, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have discovered many risk associated single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of prostate cancer (PCa). However, the majority of the associated PCa SNPs, including those in linkage disequilibrium (LD) blocks, are generally not located in protein coding regions. The systematical investigation of the functional roles of these SNPs, especially the non-coding SNPs, becomes very necessary and helpful to the understanding of the molecular mechanism of PCa.