Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is a chronic autoimmune disease.A number of SLE-associated loci have been identified in genome-wide association studies (GWASs).Typically, these GWASs used a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) as the basic anal. unit and because of the large number of SNPs tested in GWAS, a stringent significant threshold (typically < 5.0 x 10-8) was adopted to control for false pos. associationsBased on the publicly available SNP-based p-values from the database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP; accession numbers: phs000122 and phs000202) (2, 6), we performed an initial gene-based GWAS in 1311 SLE cases and 3340 controls and a follow-up replication study in 767 SLE patients and 383 non-SLE patients.According to the significance level, we identified a total of 138 significant genes, with the most significant signal at human leukocyte antigen (HLA)-DQA1 (p = 2.71 x 10-21).Therefore, the current gene-based study detected 89 addnl. novel SLE genes, which would usually be ignored in SNP-based association anal.We downloaded three publicly available expression datasets from GEO DataSets (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo) (GSE20864, GSE37356) (10) and performed differential expression analyses by t-tests for the above-mentioned 138 significant genes in multiple SLE-related cells: peripheral blood cells (sample 1: S1), mononuclear cells (sample 2: S2), and macrophages (sample 3: S3).A total of 37 genes (e.g. RNF5, BLK) showed differential expression in at least one sample.Of note, three non-HLA SLE genes (NUSAP1, POTEC, and NSF) were differentially expressed in peripheral blood cells between SLE cases and controls.As shown in Table 1, the associations of 11 genes (ZNF193, ZNRD1, RNF5, LTA, PBX2, ZNF165, HIST1H3I, ZMYND8, RDBP, POU5F1, and ATF6B), notably including the non-HLA gene ZMYND8, are supported by both replication and expression studies.In summary, this gene-based association study identified 11 novel SLE-associated genes, and the findings are further supported by a replication study and differential expression studies.This study shows high power for gene-based association in detecting disease-susceptibility genes.