NEW YORK, March 23 – SNP-detection company Variagenics of Cambridge, Mass., said Friday it has developed a way to analyze the functional impacts of certain SNPs.

The findings have been published in this week’s issue of the Journal of Molecular
Biology, which describes the computational method for predicting functional consequences of non-synonymous SNPs. These SNPs cause amino acid substitutions in proteins and are less prevalent than synoymous SNPs, or the polymorphisms in protein encoding regions that do not affect protein sequence.