Johns Hopkins’ department of pathology and Kimmel Cancer Center researchers said this week they had developed a molecular tool useful for pinpointing single mutations in particular cells surrounded by thousands more, the university said in a statement this week. The LigAmp tool “essentially filters background ‘noise’ caused by normal cells and reveals specific mutations,” the statement said.
The US National Center for Biotechnology Information announced this week that it had completed and released dbSNP build 123, according to an NCBI press release. The new version of the database contains 1.5 million human SNP assays from Perlegen, which produced 426,000 new refSNPs, for a total of 8.7 million non-redundant SNPs. Build 123 is “synced” with the September release of HapMap genotype frequency data, said NCBI.