Fifth International Mutation Detection Workshop, May 13-16, 1999, Vicoforte, Italy

The Fifth International Mutation Detection Workshop brought together inventors and major users of mutation detection methodology in a freshly refurbished 17(th) century monastery in northern Italy. There were over 120 registrants from 22 nations, all of which gave either a poster or oral presentation, making it difficult to distill the meeting into a few pages. Here we review the meeting by method type and describe highlights within each. It was clear, however, that with the imminent completion of the Human Genome Project and the recent emphasis on the utility of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), many presenters emphasized the high-throughput aspect of their methods as well as cost.