Good News, HapMap: We Still Need You

Dan Koboldt has a blog post at MassGenomics about how HapMap data is still useful, despite concerns that it would be made obsolete by the 1,000 Genomes Project. Koboldt reports on a talk he attended by the University of Chicago's Wei Zhang, whose group is "still leveraging the HapMap resource in numerous ways to better understand the relationship between genotype and phenotype." Koboldt sums up a number of efforts described by Zhang, including correlating gene expression and genotype, studying isoform variation, measuring tox profiles of anti-cancer drugs, and more. He adds that "efforts are currently under way at the University of Chicago to measure two more cell phenotypes on the HapMap samples" -- microRNA expression and DNA methylation.