Linkage Disequilibrium Study: Useful for Future and Past

摘要

There is a rather fitting citation link between the papers at #6 and #7 in the latest list of Biology Hot Papers. Reich et al.'s first citation is to Sachidanandam et al., thus cementing the relationship between the raw data and one of its most useful applications to date. The International SNP Map Working Group published in the same genome edition of Nature as the public genome sequence that still sits at #1. The SNP map is essentially an index to the book of life, a collection of 1.42 million markers that researchers can use, among other things, to guide them to the genes they are interested in. SNPs are sin-gle nucleotide polymorphisms; that is, places on the DNA where two individuals differ by a single, known letter of the genetic code. Unlike the full sequence data, the SNP map has taken much longer to become a Hot Paper. Team leader David Bentley, of the Sanger Centre in the U.K., tells Science Watch that he was neither surprised nor disappointed by this. "The sequence papers ... contained extensive analysis and new biological information of value to a wide variety of biologists," Bentley says. "By contrast, the SNP paper ... is of benefit to a more-focused group and covers a much newer area of human genetics."