| The keynote presentation at Terrapin Pharma's second annual GenomeX conference was given by Arthur Holden, Founder and CEO of First Genetic Trust and Chairman of the SNP Consortium. This is the name given to the collaborative group of industry, academia and the charity The Wellcome Trust which set out to create a high density, high quality single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) map of the human genome to be made available to all parties at no cost. Mr Holden set out the initial objectives of the Consortium, familiar to most people involved in the life science sector, but took this several stages further by presenting what we know about the SNP map generated to date, and by explaining how this data is now being used. We now know, for example, that there are approximately 1.8 million single base differences (SNPs) per individual, evenly distributed across chromosomes and across coding and non-coding regions. There is also at least one common SNP per linkage disequilibriumfragment (that is, per chromosome segment conserved during recombination - anywhere from five to 50kb). |
