Background of Cystic Fibrosis Consotium

The purpose of the Consortium is to increase and facilitate communications among CF researchers who are working on mutant identification in the CFTR gene. The Consortium is important for several obvious reasons. The first is to avoid unnecessary overlapping effort and to speed up the screening process, it would be in everybody's interest to have a format for reporting data and confirming observations. Second, an accurate population figure can be derived quickly once a mutation is identified. Further, the information is not only important for carrier testing, but also for understanding the function of the CF gene product, and for correlating clinical symptoms and mutations. There are currently 130 groups of CF laboratories (from over 30 countries) in the Consortium.