Written by NEW YORK – Scientists mapping the structure of DNA minor differences that distinguish one person from another, an achievement that will help researchers find genes that promote common illnesses such as heart disease and diabetes.
Map represents “real change in how to study the genetics of disease,” said Dr. David Altshuler, head of the project, which included more than 200 researchers from six countries.
Scientists want to find disease-related genes as a means for diagnosis, prediction and developing treatments. Such genes give clues to the biological bases of disease and, therefore, suggest strategies for developing therapies.
Genes that predispose people to common diseases – heart disease, cancer, diabetes, asthma and others – are devilishly hard to find.
But the new “HapMap” – taken from the perspective of genetics, haplotype – opens the door to initiate a comprehensive scan of human DNA for genes, said Altshuler, who in the wide research institute, which is in collaboration with Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Massachusetts General Hospital .
It is not yet clear how many genes it is or what will be useful, Altshuler said. Success is unlikely to have a new disease treatments five to 10 years or more, he said.
HapMap data have been used to track down a gene associated with macular degeneration eye disease, said HapMap project participant Dr. Lincoln Stein of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.
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The map is described in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature. Participating scientists came from Canada, China, Japan, Nigeria, Great Britain and the United States. The project analyzed DNA samples from 269 people from Nigeria, Beijing, Tokyo and Utah.
“It’s a victory for science cooperation,” said Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt. “This is an important milestone.” Find out how scientists decode our DNA
Human DNA consists of more than 3 billion building blocks whose sequences form genes, as well as letters to spell words. For any two unrelated people, these letters are 99.9 percent identical. But that leaves millions of single-letter variations, called SNPs (pronounced “scissors”), which provide the genetic differences between people.
HapMap shows how more than 1 million of these SNPs form patterns: one with one particular version of the SNP is likely to carry particular versions of other SNPs as well. (Group of variants, which says that along haplotype.)