On-going studies into the diversity of the human genome

[Nereid]

This thread could equally well be in Biology, but since genetics and hereditability have figured so prominently in the various IQ threads in this sub-forum, I feel it would a good place, and perhaps a useful resource.

L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza published the classic work in the field in 1994: "The History and Geography of Human Genes". The result of over a decade of detailed work, it was nonetheless compiled before the human genome had been mapped.

Since then, Cavalli-Sforza, Piazza and others have been involved in getting the ambitious "http://www.stanford.edu/group/morrinst/hgdp/faq.html " off the ground. What is it? " The HGD Project is an effort by anthropologists, geneticists, doctors, linguists, and other scholars from around the world to document the genetic variation of the human species worldwide. This scientific endeavor is designed to collect information on human genome variation to help us understand the genetic makeup of all of humanity and not just some of its parts. The information will also be used to learn about human biological history, the biological relationships among different human groups, and may be useful in understanding the causes of and determining the treatment of particular human diseases."

I do not know its current status.

The http://www.sanger.ac.uk/genetics/humgen.shtml has several projects underway to study variation in the human genome, with disease association and variable response to environmental factors and drugs as key areas.

Perhaps other PF members would like to add details of similar big projects that they know of.

 

[Nereid]

HapMap Project

This project may supercede, or incorporate, some of the Sanger Institute's work.

From http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20031219/02 :
"A major international project to produce a complete map of common patterns of differences in the human genome—haplotypes—has been launched. The “HapMap” is the first systematic approach to understanding diseases with a multigenic component.

In the December 18/25 Nature, the International HapMap Consortium publishes details of the aims and methods of the $100 million collaborative effort—a similar scale to the Human Genome Project—that combines the efforts of major genome sequencing centers including the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) and Baylor College of Medicine in the United States, the United Kingdom's Sanger Institute and Oxford University, the Chinese HapMap Consortium, and teams from universities in Japan, Africa, China, and Canada in association with the US company Illumina. The Consortium intends to genotype more than a million sequence variants and to analyze their frequencies and degrees of association in a total of 270 DNA samples from Northern and Western European, Chinese, Nigerian, and Japanese populations."

 

[selfAdjoint]

Hapmap is something we should start a thread on. What a haplotype is, how they differ from traditional gene-oriented views of the genome, what markers have been found to date, and so on. This is a real advance beyond basic high school ideas of genomics, and deserves a more detailed look than just the race (or genetic population aspect.