Consortium publishes Phase II map of human genetic...( The International HapMap Consortium ...)

The International HapMap Consortium today published analyses of its second-generation map of human genetic variation, which contains three times more markers than the initial version unveiled in 2005. In two papers in the journal Nature, the consortium describes how the higher resolution map offers greater power to detect genetic variants involved in common diseases, explore the structure of human genetic variation and learn how environmental factors, such as infectious agents, have shaped the human genome.

Any two humans are more than 99 percent the same at the genetic level. However, it is important to understand the small fraction of genetic material that varies among people because it can help explain individual differences in susceptibility to disease, response to drugs or reaction to environmental factors. Variation in the human genome is organized into local neighborhoods called haplotypes, which usually are inherited as intact blocks of information. Consequently, researchers refer to the map of human genetic variation as a haplotype map, or HapMap.

The International HapMap Consortium is a public-private partnership of researchers and funding agencies from Canada, China, Japan, Nigeria, the United Kingdom and the United States. The U.S. component of the project is led by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) on behalf of the 20 institutes, centers and offices of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that contributed funding.

Thanks to this consortiums pioneering efforts to map human genetic variation, we are already seeing a windfall of results that are shedding new light on the complex genetics of common diseases, said NHGRI Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. This new approach to research, called genome-wide association studies, has recently uncovered new clues to the genetic factors involved in type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, prostate cancer, multiple sclerosis and many other disorders. These
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