The research will be especially useful for complex diseases like heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, alcoholism and osteoporosis, which involve many faulty genes as opposed to just one, as in cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anemia. SNPs are key agents of change among the roughly 3 billion nucleotide base pairs -- the building blocks of DNA and genes -- that make up the human genome. While 99.9 percent of the genome is identical for everyone, SNPs are among the .01 percent that account for all the racial and other physiological differences among humans.
"Nucleotides code for proteins that give people different traits, such as blue eyes instead of brown, athletic ability or artistic ability," Matise says, "traits that also include how susceptible an individual may be to certain diseases."
SNPs are valuable research tools because they are the most common and simple type of genetic variation shared among people, she adds. "They occur roughly every 1,000 base pairs along the human genome. As such, they are easy to detect and serve as genetic landmarks to help researchers navigate the genome in search of particular genes."
The SNP linkage map is being developed using one of two high performance, E-10000 Sun Microsystems computers, each with 64 processors, that are located at Rutgers Center for Advanced Information Processing (CAIP). CAIP is jointly supported by Rutgers, the New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology, and major computer and telecommunications industry firms. Rutgers has the largest 10000 configuration of any university in the United States.
The linkage map is another step toward the consortium's goal of constructing a high-density, high-quality map of SNPs throughout the human genome. The group has so far identified and mapped more than 1.5 million S
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Contact: Kevin P. Hyland
khyland@ur.rutgers.edu
732-973-7084
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
24-Sep-2001