ETS2 and inflammatory bowel disease: In order to examine whether the ETS2-SE accounts for the functional consequence of certain non-coding variation events in IBD, we collected all known risk SNPs for IBD derived from previous GWAS (genome-wide association study) results and labelled their position within the regulatory regions of ETS2. As a result, a known risk SNP for CD (rs2836754; T/C) [28] was found to reside in a fragment of ETS2-SE (Fig. 3E) which was required for the transcription activation of ETS2 (fragment E3 in Fig. 2D).