[SNP project in the Millennium Genome Project, Japan]

The basic outlines of the Millennium Genome Project were drawn by the Japanese government on December 19, 1999. In the "Disease gene" team, 5 disease have been chosen as the targets of the Project, Alzheimer's disease, cancer, diabetes, hypertension and asthma. Along with the knowledge-based candidate gene approaches, the complementary strategy of the disease gene hunting, the statistics-based approach, is being deployed. The Project decided to go for a genome-wide, gene-based SNP scan through a close collaboration with another team of the Project, "Standard polymorphism" team, which already discovered c. a. 160,000 SNPs in and around the genes of the Japanese people.