In addition to haemoglobin related functions, some of the candidate genes were enriched in pathways linked to malaria pathogenesis including blood coagulation related processes (Francischetti, Seydel, and Monteiro 2008; Sullivan et al., 2016) and interferon gamma mediated signalling pathways (Hunt et al., 2014; Tosevski et al., 2017). Here, IFNG is linked to malaria.