1000 genome project launched

Written byBob Grant

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An international consortium linkurl:announced;http://www.1000genomes.org/ today (Jan 22) a plan to sequence at least 1000 genomes from people all over the world. "The 1000 Genome Project" seeks to assemble the most comprehensive map yet of human genetic variation. The project will be supported by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in England, the Beijing Genomics Institute, Shenzhen (BGI Shenzhen) in China, and the National Institutes of Health's National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). The 1000 Genome Project will build on data gathered by the haplotype map linkurl:(HapMap);http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/23065/ project, compiling a catalog of linkurl:genetic variants;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/53607/ that are present at 1 percent or greater frequency in the human population across most of the genome, and down to 0.5 percent or lower within genes. Participating institutions include the Sanger Institute, BGI Shenzhen, and NHGRI-funded labs in universities throughout the US. Ultimately, researchers expect to churn out sequence data at an average rate of about 8.2 billion bases, or about two human genomes, per day. The genomic data will be available to the public through the linkurl:National Center for Biotechnology Information's;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Database/ and the linkurl:European Bioinformatics Institute's;http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ online databases, and organizers expect the project to cost between $30 million and $50 million.

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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