NEW YORK, July 24-The SNP Consortium announced today that it has finished a genome-wide human linkage map that pinpoints the location of nearly 3,000 common single nucleotide polymorphisms.
The map was created from inheritance and genotyping data collected from 767 individuals in roughly 50 families.
Consortium researchers used reference genealogical data from the French Centre d'Etude du Polymorphisme Humain, and Celera and Motorola Life Sciences performed the genotyping assays. Rutgers University's Laboratory of Computational Genetics, under the guidance of Tara Matise, analyzed the data and built the map.
In addition to locating individual SNPs, the map includes information about the linkage between polymorphisms-an index of the probability that groups of individual genetic variants will be inherited together. Researchers hope that information will permit the association of common genetic patterns with human diseases.
The map is freely available on the consortium's website.
The SNP Consortium, formed in 1999 as a non-profit, plans to create a high-resolution SNP map of the human genome. It has so far identified and mapped more than 1.4 million SNPs. Members include pharmaceutical companies like GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer, academic institutes like the Wellcome Trust Sanger Centre and Cold Spring Harbor, and genomics companies like Orchid BioSciences.