TAMAL: an integrated approach to choosing SNPs for genetic studies of human complex traits

Abstract

Investigators conducting studies of the molecular genetics of complex traits in humans often need rationally to select a set of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from the hundreds or thousands available for a candidate gene. Accomplishing this requires integration of genomic data from distributed databases and is both time-consuming and error-prone. We developed the TAMAL (Technology And Money Are Limiting) web site to help identify promising SNPs for further investigation. For a given list of genes, TAMAL identifies SNPs that meet user-specified criteria (e.g. haplotype tagging SNPs or SNP predicted to lead to amino acid changes) from current versions of online resources (i.e. HapMap, Perlegen, Affymetrix, dbSNP and the UCSC genome browser).

Availability: TAMAL is a platform independent web-based application available free of charge at http://neoref.ils.unc.edu/tamal.

Supplementary information: http://neoref.ils.unc.edu/tamal/.