The Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium (abbreviated WTCCC) is a collaboration between fifty research groups in the United Kingdom in the field of human genetics. Established in 2005, the WTCCC aims to conduct genome-wide association studies (GWASs) to shed light on the genetic architecture of common human diseases. The founding chairman of the consortium was University of Oxford statistician

Peter Donnelly Sir Peter James Donnelly (born 15 May 1959) is an Australian-British mathematician and Professor of Statistical Science at the University of Oxford, and the CEO of Genomics PLC. He is a specialist in applied probability and has made contrib ...

. The consortium was funded by £9 million from the Wellcome Trust. According to the consortium's website, it has identified "approximately 90" new susceptibility

loci Locus (plural loci) is Latin for "place". It may refer to: Entertainment * Locus (comics), a Marvel Comics mutant villainess, a member of the Mutant Liberation Front * ''Locus'' (magazine), science fiction and fantasy magazine ** '' Locus Award ...

for common human diseases. The consortium's initial goal was to conduct large GWASs for eight common human diseases: tuberculosis, coronary heart disease, type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis,

Crohn's disease Crohn's disease is a type of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) that may affect any segment of the gastrointestinal tract. Symptoms often include abdominal pain, diarrhea (which may be bloody if inflammation is severe), fever, abdominal distension ...

and ulcerative colitis, bipolar disorder and

hypertension Hypertension (HTN or HT), also known as high blood pressure (HBP), is a long-term medical condition in which the blood pressure in the arteries is persistently elevated. High blood pressure usually does not cause symptoms. Long-term high bl ...

. These GWASs included a total of 19,000 subjects, of whom 2,000 had one of the eight diseases and an additional 3,000 served as controls. The study participants were genotyped using

Affymetrix Affymetrix is now Applied Biosystems, a brand of DNA microarray products sold by Thermo Fisher Scientific that originated with an American biotechnology research and development and manufacturing company of the same name. The Santa Clara, Califor ...

's GeneChip Human Mapping 500K Array Set, and genotype calling was conducted with the Chiamo algorithm. The results of the WTCCC's initial research were reported in '' Nature'' in 2007. The research identified 24 genetic association "signals" that were

statistically significant In statistical hypothesis testing, a result has statistical significance when it is very unlikely to have occurred given the null hypothesis (simply by chance alone). More precisely, a study's defined significance level, denoted by \alpha, is the p ...

at '' P'' < 5 × 10⁻⁷. At the time, this was the largest study ever conducted of the genetics of human diseases. In announcing the study's findings at a London news conference, Donnelly said, "If you think of the genome as a very long road that you are trying to find your way along in the dark, previously we have only been able to turn lights on in a small number of places, but now we can turn on lights in a large number of places— in this case half a million lights". The 2007 ''Nature'' paper was later named "paper of the year" by '' the Lancet'', and it led to the WTCCC being named "research leader of the year" by '' Scientific American''.

References

External links

*{{Official website, https://www.wtccc.org.uk/ Consortia in the United Kingdom Genetic epidemiology Genetics in the United Kingdom Population genetics organizations Research projects Scientific organisations based in the United Kingdom Scientific organizations established in 2005 Wellcome Trust 2005 establishments in England