February 16, 2001

Researchers from around the world came together this week to explain the latest findings from the Human Genome Project. The results were featured in a special issue of Nature magazine, published Feb. 15. Many MGH researchers have participated in the project, contributing significant data to the findings. Researchers from a private-sector group doing similar work also published their findings in Science this week.

David Altshuler, MD, PhD, of the MGH Department of Medicine and MGH Molecular Biology, and a researcher with the Whitehead/MIT Center for Genome Research, was the senior author of one of the papers in Nature entitled "A Map of Human Genome Sequence Variation Containing 1.42 Million Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms."

Steven Reppert, MD, of MGH Developmental Chronobiology, and his research team also contributed to the project with their paper "Keeping Time with the Human Genome," which details their research into the molecular working of the mammalian circadian clock.

The Human Genome Project is a collaboration between the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health, in an effort to identify all genetic material by determining the sequence of the humane genome's DNA.