The 1000 Genomes Project

jd writes "An international consortium of specialists in genetics has announced the 1000 Genomes Project, in which at least 1,000 people from around the world will have their genomes fully sequenced as part of an effort to discover the relationship between genetics and disease. At present, over 100 regions of DNA are known to be related to illnesses, but the maps that exist are vague and are drawn from an extremely small population pool. According to the article, this results in the need for slow, expensive, and laborious studies to pinpoint causes, especially for rarer conditions. This project aims to find conditions that might only appear once in every 2,000 people (though how they intend to do that with half that number is unclear). The researchers hope to massively speed up the diagnosis of genetically linked illnesses and to improve the reliability of such diagnoses."

Comments

Where do I sign up?

[AndGodSed]

I've got marfan syndrome. I am really eager to have my genome sampled so that this condition is better understood.

www.marfan.org

Re:1 in 2000 people

[jd]

I'm not convinced it's coincidental that Google's research space was announced shortly before this project. I suspect Google is/was thinking along very similar lines. BLAST may be adequate for many things, but GoogleBLAST would be about what it would take to crunch any significant collection of entire human genomes.