The SNP Consortium A non-profit foundation set up by the Wellcome Trust and various pharmaceutical companies to develop up to 300,000 SNPs distributed evenly throughout the human genome and to make the information related to those SNPs publicly available. In collaboration with the National Human Genome Research Institute, The National Center for Biotechnology Information has established the dbSNP database to serve as a central repository for both single base nucleotide subsitutions and short deletion and insertion polymorphisms. Once discovered, these polymorphisms could be used by additional laboratories, using the sequence information around the polymorphism and the specific experimental conditions. The data in dbSNP will be integrated with other NCBI genomic data. As with all NCBI projects, the data in dbSNP will be freely available to the scientific community and made available in a variety of forms.
Searches utilise a text string or a DNA sequence.
Data submission is by a series of Web page data submission forms. All submitted data is made available to other public databases. Additional information, such as assay conditions, can be supplied but this is optional. It represents the first easily accessible repository of published data on the frequency of human inherited disorders worldwide. The site is organized by chromosomes and cytogenetic location.