Title

On the challenges of the HapMap resource

Authors

Wei Zhang¹ and M. Eileen Dolan^{1, 2, 3}

Affiliation

¹Section of Hematology/Oncology, Department of Medicine, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA; ²Committee on Clinical Pharmacology and Pharmacogenomics, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA; ³Cancer Research Center, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Email

edolan@medicine.bsd.uchicago.edu

+773-702-4441

+773-702-0963; * Corresponding author

Article Type

Views & Challenges

Date

received December 29, 2007; accepted January 09, 2008; published January 11, 2008

The International HapMap Project provides a key resource of genotypic data on human lymphoblastoid cell lines derived from four major world populations of European, African, Chinese and Japanese ancestry for researchers to associate with various phenotypic data to find genes affecting health, disease and response to drugs. Recently, the HapMap resource has significantly benefited research areas such as gene expression variation studies. Besides some intrinsic limitations, there are a few challenges that should be considered in the next wave of research using this tremendous resource. We suggest that overcoming these challenges or considering the confounding variables in the interpretation of results can provide more insights into the current views of the human genome as well as complex traits such as drug response variation and susceptibility to common diseases.

HapMap; lymphoblastoid cell lines; single nuceotide polymorphism; genotype; gene expression

Citation

Zhang and Dolan, Bioinformation 2(6): 238-239 (2008)

Edited by

P. Kangueane

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.