ATP2B1 and essential hypertension: Genomewide association studies (GWAS) have shown ATP2B1, the gene for plasma membrane calcium ATPase 1 (PMCA1), to be highly associated with BP and with essential hypertension, and importantly, demonstrated this as a consistent observation in different ethnic populations (Cho et al., 2009; Levy et al., 2009; Tabara et al., 2010).