A collaboration of 24 leading human geneticists will look at TB, heart disease, type 1 and 2 diabetes, arthritis, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, bipolar disorder and hypertension, in hopes to gain a better understanding of who is at risk, and the development of new treatments.

Researchers in the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium (WTCCC) will analyze over 19,000 DNA samples - 2,000 from patients with each disease which will be compared with 3,000 samples from healthy people to identify the genetic differences between them.

Although the human genome is made up of more than three billion chemical bases, researchers now know that most of these are identical in everyone.

This project will examine 675,000 points where key variations occur.