Geneticists at the genomics meeting in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, last week celebrated the success of the International HapMap project — and predicted its eventual demise.

The project, unveiled in 2005, is a database of markers of genetic diversity called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs. By comparing HapMap data against SNPs from people with specific diseases, researchers hope to pinpoint the genetic glitches that underlie those diseases.

Many studies have now been published that have used data from the HapMap project, which aims to cut down the cost and effort involved in finding the genetic errors that lead to common disorders such as heart problems, mental illness and diabetes.

At the meeting, Peter Donnelly of the University of Oxford, UK, who is one of the investigators in the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium, presented findings from a major study the group conducted of seven common diseases in 16,179 participants. The study, expected to be published shortly, is perhaps the most ambitious trawl yet for common disease genes. And it did turn up possible genetic causes for some of the diseases, Donnelly said. Together with results from other 'genome-wide association studies', Donnelly's report had researchers toasting their successes, and hoping for more.

“For ten years, we have been predicting that genome-wide association studies will work, and it is clear now that they do,” says Ewan Birney, who runs the gene bank at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Cambridge, UK. “What this meeting says to me is that we have got to do this in every disease that matters to us, including diseases of the developing world.”

The HapMap was a substitute until we could afford to do whole genomes.

But another message from the meeting was that tools not available at the dawn of the HapMap could soon make the project obsolete. Scientists described some of the first sequencing projects that use new technologies developed to decode DNA faster and more cheaply than ever before.

The new technologies will allow researchers to compare many more types of variation than just SNPs, and in greater numbers of people. The fast sequencers available now — made by 454 Life Sciences in Connecticut, and Solexa in San Diego, California, both of which were acquired this year by larger corporations — enable scientists to read the genomes of small organisms in weeks, and of larger organisms in months. For instance, 454 is expected to announce shortly that its technology was able to start and complete the sequencing of the genome of geneticist James Watson between January and March.

Over the next year, new rapid sequencers from Applied Biosystems in Foster City, California, and Helicos Biosciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts, are expected to make their debut. Once these quick sequencers become routine, it will obviate the need for tools such as the HapMap, scientists say. “The HapMap was a substitute until we could afford to do whole genomes,” says plant genomicist Magnus Nordborg of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.