In the news

Representatives from publicly funded institutes involved in the human genome project, and from the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries, have met to discuss a collaborative project to map around 300,000 "haplotypes" over the next two years (see report in Nature 12 July, p. 105). The project would build on the work of the consortium that was set up to find and map two million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) across the genome. The haplotype mapping project would identify sets of SNP variants that are characteristically found together in a particular population. A specific set of genetic variants that are found together on the same chromosome is called a haplotype. The aim of the haplotype mapping project is to facilitate the discovery of specific sets or blocks of SNPs that are associated with characteristics such as susceptibility to diseases - hopefully a more manageable task than trying to discover such associations using individual SNPs. One controversial aspect of the project is whether different racial or ethnic groups should be studied separately, and if so how these groups should be defined.