However it is typical for these projects to start with a sperm cell donated by an anonymous donor. We are getting better at this though but this means that we do not have a single genome mapping project which can claim to be first. However there are a number of repeating sequences in the genes which we can not map using current techniques. We are able to map most of the interesting sections just fine.
Firstly we have not actually mapped the full human genome. And we can compare the genome of a number of peolpe to get an average to compare against.īut if you are asking who was first, or at least who was first using a specific technique, that is a more interesting question. So we are selecting interesting people to map the genome of as well as a lot of "standard" individuals. The cost have come down to reasonable levels for research projects. They've combined that information with the donor's medical records so that they can use statistics to look for genes that cause diseases.Ĭurrently a lot of peoples genomes have been mapped. There are teams that have done so, and made big databases that describe every tiny difference between each one they sequenced and the one that's the reference. What took billions of dollars and years to do at the time, can now be done in a day for a few hundred dollars.īecause it's cheap and easy, we've sequenced millions of human genomes. In the years that followed, DNA sequencing became much cheaper and faster as we improved how we do it, and designed machines to do it. While some parts a mix of DNA sequence from several people, lots of it is just based off DNA from a single person. In fact, some of the samples were mishandled and we weren't able to get much sequence information out of them, meaning that most of the DNA used came from one anonymous person.
Person-to-person our DNA is almost identical, but not quite - everyone is a just a bit different. The idea was that we'd sequence the DNA from each person, line up the sequence from each, then decide what the most common DNA sequence was at each position, and keep track of the differences among the people. They vials of blood didn't have the people's names on them, so we don't know who they were. Originally, we got DNA from blood from hundreds of donors, and randomly picked 20 from men and 20 from women to actually use. So when we talk about "mapping the human genome", we're really talking about selecting a representative and then making notes about its features, locations of genes, etc. The "human genome" you're talking about is called a "reference genome" - everyone's DNA is different, but early on we figured out that we need to have one genome that everyone can look at and make notes about: where genes are, what they do, how they differ from person to person, etc.