Marilee Ogren | Jun 1, 2003 | 8 min read
Clockwise from top left: images courtesy of Affymetrix, Illumina, Sequenom and Illumina Take any two individuals, sequence and compare their genomic DNA, and you'll find that the vast majority (about 99.9%) of the sequences are identical. In the remaining 0.1% lie differences in disease susceptibility, environmental response, and drug metabolism. Researchers are understandably keen to dissect these variations, most of which take the form of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). A SNP (pron