Association studies that correlate SNP patterns to disease risks are straightforward. Clues to the past can be subtler, but they are found at all levels of evolution--from the great branching points of speciation, to ones among the primates, to those within modern human populations. And a general consensus has emerged: Humans haven't changed much since coming out of Africa long ago.
"This is a tremendously exciting time to study human variation, because we finally have enough tools and infrastructure to correlate genotype to phenotype. The human genome sequence is the foundation to investigate human sequence variation," says Eric Lander, director of the Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research in Cambridge, Mass. And that variation reflects evolutionary processes that molded the modern genome. Lander was one of several speakers on these aspects of SNPs at the Fourth International Meeting on Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms and Complex Genome Analysis held in October at ...
