An international research consortium announced the 1000 Genomes Project, an ambitious effort that will involve sequencing the genomes of at least a thousand people from around the world to create the most detailed and medically useful picture to date of human genetic variation.
The project will receive major support from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, England, the Beijing Genomics Institute, Shenzhen (BGI Shenzhen) in China and the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Drawing on the expertise of multidisciplinary research teams, the 1000 Genomes Project will develop a new map of the human genome that will provide a view of biomedically relevant DNA variations at a resolution unmatched by current resources. As with other major human genome reference projects, data from the 1000 Genomes Project will be made swiftly available to the worldwide scientific community through freely accessible public databases.
“The 1000 Genomes Project will examine the human genome at a level of detail that no one has done before,” said Richard Durbin, Ph.D., of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, who is co-chair of the consortium. “Such a project would have been unthinkable only two years ago. Today, thanks to amazing strides in sequencing technology, bioinformatics and population genomics, it is now within our grasp. So we are moving forward to build a tool that will greatly expand and further accelerate efforts to find more of the genetic factors involved in human health and disease.”
Any two humans are more than 99 percent the same at the genetic level. However, it is important to understand the small fraction of genetic material that varies among people because it can help explain individual differences in susceptibility to disease, response to drugs or reaction to environmental factors. Variation in the human genome is organized into local neighborhoods called haplotypes, which are stretches of DNA usually inherited as intact blocks of information.
Recently developed catalogs of human genetic variation, such as the HapMap, have proved valuable in human genetic research. Using the HapMap and related resources, researchers already have discovered more than 100 regions of the genome containing genetic variants that are associated with risk of common human diseases such as diabetes, coronary artery disease, prostate and breast cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease and age-related macular degeneration.
However, because existing maps are not extremely detailed, researchers often must follow those studies with costly and time-consuming DNA sequencing to help pinpoint the precise causative variants. The new map would enable researchers to more quickly zero in on disease-related genetic variants, speeding efforts to use genetic information to develop new strategies for diagnosing, treating and preventing common diseases.
The scientific goals of the 1000 Genomes Project are to produce a catalog of variants 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. This will likely entail sequencing the genomes of at least 1,000 people. These people will be anonymous and will not have any medical information collected on them, because the project is developing a basic resource to provide information on genetic variation. The catalog that is developed will be used by researchers in many future studies of people with particular diseases.
“This new project will increase the sensitivity of disease discovery efforts across the genome five-fold and within gene regions at least 10-fold,” said NHGRI Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. “Our existing databases do a reasonably good job of cataloging variations found in at least 10 percent of a population. By harnessing the power of new sequencing technologies and novel computational methods, we hope to give biomedical researchers a genome-wide map of variation down to the 1 percent level. This will change the way we carry out studies of genetic disease.”
Source: National Human Genome Research Institute, USA