Evidence of such organization has been building over the past several years, says scientist Mark Daly, Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research, Cambridge, Mass. But a slew of papers in last month's Nature Genetics are the first attempt to bring the data together.1-5 If the evidence is proven, scientists plan to use these haplotypes to locate disease genes, a more concise process than wading through the entire genome.
| Courtesy of Whitehead Institute |
 John Rioux |
Single base pair differences form most human genetic variations and have been found on all 23 human chromosomes. So far, scientists have mapped more than 1.4 million of them on the human genome. But "SNPs don't genetically travel on their own," says geneticist John Rioux, Daly's co-author on two of the Nature Genetics papers.1,2 "They travel in packs," explains David Altshuler, also at the Whitehead Institute and a Harvard Medical School professor.
These packs, known as ...
