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Now Even the Hoi Polloi Are Being Sequenced. Sigh.

Jan 24, 2008

The community is aflutter with one of the field's worst-kept secrets: a consortium led by NHGRI, Sanger, and the Beijing Genomics Institute, finally announced its plans to study 1,000 genomes with new DNA sequencing technologies.

At Genetic Future, Daniel MacArthur blogs favorably on the project, though he notes that "the title of the project is actually pretty misleading - they won't be sequencing 1,000 complete genomes." (Complete genome sequence, whether at low quality or high, will be limited to fewer than 200 people, he says; the rest will likely be covered with exon sequencing.) Still, he says, "this project will have truly profound implications for research into human variation and disease."

 

Breaking News
The Scan

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