The 1000 Genomes Project, a large-scale community effort to produce genome sequence data on ~2000 diverse individuals, will facilitate sequence-based GWA studies in diverse populations, serving as the analogous public resource for sequence-based GWA studies that the HapMap provided for tag-SNP GWA studies. With sequencing, concerns about population biases in marker ascertainment are likely to subside. Further, the larger number of individuals in the 1000 Genomes Project compared to the initial 270 individuals in the HapMap permits examination of a wider diversity of samples. Thus, forthcoming genomic resources already under development are expected to improve the conditions for examination of diverse populations in GWA studies.
