HapMap project underway
An international consortium of academic centers, government institutions, and private companies has outlined its three-year, $100 million effort to produce a publicly available, genome-wide haplotype map—linking single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) across the genome—that will help researchers associate genetic variance with disease. It is the second step of a plan that was initially announced in August 2001 (Nat. Biotechnol. 19, 704, 2001). The International HapMap Project will oversee the analysis of blood samples of people from Nigeria, Japan, China, and the United States in order to build the map based on information from earlier genetic-data efforts: the publicly funded Human Genome Project and the SNP Consortium (Deerfield, IL), a group that finds SNPs in the human genetic code (Nat. Biotechnol. 17, 526, 1999). “It's a perfect way to take the SNPs that we know about and then test them in hundreds of people for their correlations with each other,” says David Altshuler, who will direct the project at the Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research (Cambridge, MA). Public funding for the project will come from the governments of Japan, Canada, China, and the United States. The Wellcome Trust (London) will also contribute funds, and the SNP Consortium will oversee private funding. BR
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