Leading the way toward understanding human health
Contact: Peter Sherwood begins sherwoodcshl.edu 516-367-6947 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (USA), the International HapMap Project, the mapping of the human genome variation of genes in health and disease monitoring and response to therapy of patients involved a main goals of modern biomedical research research. In the 18th December issue of Nature describes the International HapMap consortium to develop new tools and approaches that has increased the ability of scientists to identify genes related to disease and to develop appropriate diagnostic and therapeutic measures.individual susceptibility to disease and response to therapy are different in part determined by DNA sequence variations scattered throughout our DNA sequence, called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or
SNPs. Many regions of the human genome bear witness to the common variations in DNA sequence, which are called tag SNPs. One of the objectives of the International HapMap Project is to map the position of the SNP markers in representative samples of DNA from human populations with ancestry from parts of Africa, Asia and Europe.Dr. Lincoln Stein, a bio-computer scientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York whose group is one of the leading players in the HapMap said, the results of the HapMap increase power and reduce the costs of future genetic association studies and large- scale, and greatly accelerate the discovery of genes involved in cancer, heart disease, and other common diseases. Dr. David Bentley, head of genetics at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in
Cambridge (United Kingdom) and the leader of another major group involved in the project said, the HapMap will be applicable to a wide range of medical conditions that have a genetic component including common human diseases.Because it is important that this resource is available, the groups have contributed to this international project to share their data and the resulting map of the variation as a public resource. Thus, mylittleandy.comPages: [1] 2