KAREBrowser: SNP database of Korea Association REsource project

Abstract

International HapMap Project and the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) provide plentiful resources on human genome information for the public. However, these kinds of information available from HapMap and HGDP are limited mainly due to the small size of samples in both databases. Recently we conducted genome-wide association study (GWAS) with 8,842 Korean subjects (Cho et al., Nature Genetics 2009). In an effort to build a publicly available browsing system for genome data resulted from our large scale GWAS, we developed the browser, namely Korea Association REsource (KARE) browser. This browser provides users with a large scale of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) information comprising 1.5 million SNPs from population-based cohorts of 8,842 samples. KAREBrowser was based on the generic genome browser (GBrowse) that is a web-based application tool developed for users to navigate and visualize the genomic features and annotations in an interactive manner. All SNP information and related functions are available at the web site http://ksnp.cdc.go.kr/karebrowser/.