Gene-Mappers Take New Aim at Diseases
tratto da The New York Times 30 Oct 2002
A $100 million project to develop a new kind of map of the human genome was
announced today by an international consortium. Its goal is to hasten
discovery of the variant genes thought to underlie common human diseases
like diabetes, asthma and cancer.
The consortium includes government agencies from Japan, China and Canada,
and The Wellcome Trust of London. Its largest contributor, from the United
States, is the National Institutes of Health, which is investing $39 million
over the project's three years.
The map will be constructed by analysing the genomes of people in four
ethnic groups: Japanese, Chinese, the Yoruba people of Nigeria, and
Americans of Northern and Western European descent. If these four groups do
not capture a thorough enough pattern of human variation, more may be added
later.
The principle underlying the map is a discovery about the human genome made
only a year ago by Dr. Mark J. Daly and colleagues at the Whitehead
Institute in Cambridge, Mass. They found that human DNA has been inherited
generation after generation in large, unchanged blocks, up to 100,000 units
in length, from the ancestral human population and, contrary to what had
been assumed, has not yet been thoroughly mixed by the vigorous shuffling of
DNA from the maternal and paternal chromosomes that takes place between
generations.
These large blocks of DNA are known as haplotypes, and the new map, called
the International HapMap, will chart the location of these blocks throughout
the human genome. Dr. Eric Lander, Dr. David Altshuler and other members of
the Whitehead Institute have rapidly expanded on Dr. Daly's discovery, and
the N.I.H. has boldly built the hapmap project around it.
The goal of the hapmap is not to find disease genes directly, but to create
a general tool that will allow others to do so. It is designed to work in
general populations and does not require patients to be related to one
another, unlike the basis of the Decode approach in Iceland.
2001 - 2002 Gardacuore onlus
questa pagina e' stata aggiornata domenica 03 novembre 2002
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