What is The SNP consortium (TSC)?
In April 1999, ten large pharmaceutical companies and the U.K. Wellcome Trust philanthropy announced the establishment of a consortium lead by Arthur L. Holden to find and map 300,000 common SNPs. The goal was to generate a widely accepted, high-quality, extensive, publicly available map using SNPs as markers evenly distributed throughout the human genome. In the end, many more SNPs (1.8 million total) were discovered. Now that the SNP discovery phase of the TSC project is essentially complete, emphasis has shifted to studying SNPs in populations. Various TSC member laboratories are genotyping a subset of SNPs as part of the Allele Frequency Project. The goal of the TSC allele frequency/genotype project is to determine the frequency of certain SNPs in three major world populations. See the TSC website for more information.
