Hapmap Project

Most common diseases, such as diabetes, cancer, stroke, heart disease, depression, and asthma, are affected by many genes and environmental factors. Although any two unrelated people share about 99.9% of their DNA sequences, the remaining 0.1% is important because it contains the genetic variants that influence how people differ in their risk of disease or their response to drugs. Discovering the DNA sequence variants that contribute to common disease risk offers one of the best opportunities for understanding the complex causes of disease in humans. The goal of the International HapMap Project is to develop a haplotype map of the human genome, the HapMap, which will describe the common patterns of human DNA sequence variation. The Project is a collaboration among scientists in Japan, the U.K., Canada, China, Nigeria, and the U.S. For more details, visit www.hapmap.org.

References

• THE INTERNATIONAL HAPMAP CONSORTIUM (2003). The International HapMap Project. Nature. 426, 789-79.
• THE INTERNATIONAL HAPMAP CONSORTIUM (2004). Integrating Science and Ethics in the International HapMap Project. Nat. Rev. Gen. 5:467-475.
• THE INTERNATIONAL HAPMAP CONSORTIUM (2005). A haplotype map of the human genome. Nature 437:1299-1320.