The 1000 Genomes Project (abbreviated as 1KGP), launched in January 2008, was an international research effort to establish by far the most detailed catalogue of human genetic variation.
Scientists planned to sequence the genomes of at least one thousand anonymous participants from a number of different ethnic groups within the following three years, using newly developed technologies which were faster and less expensive.
In 2010, the project finished its pilot phase, which was described in detail in a publication in the journal Nature.
In 2012, the sequencing of 1092 genomes was announced in a Nature publication. In 2015, two papers in Nature reported results and the completion of the project and opportunities for future research. Many rare variations, restricted to closely related groups, were identified, and eight structural-variation classes were analyzed.
The project unites multidisciplinary research teams from institutes around the world, including China, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Nigeria, Peru, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Each will contribute to the enormous sequence dataset and to a refined human genome map, which will be freely accessible through public databases to the scientific community and the general public alike.
By providing an overview of all human genetic variation, the consortium will generate a valuable tool for all fields of biological science, especially in the disciplines of genetics, medicine, pharmacology, biochemistry, and bioinformatics.
Another Project ‘The Human Genome Project’:
The Human Genome Project (HGP) was an international scientific research project with the goal of determining the sequence of nucleotide base pairs that make up human DNA, and of identifying and mapping all of the genes of the human genome from both a physical and a functional standpoint.
It remains the world’s largest collaborative biological project. After the idea was picked up in 1984 by the US government when the planning started, the project formally launched in 1990 and was declared complete in 2003.
Funding came from the US government through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as well as numerous other groups from around the world.
A parallel project was conducted outside of government by the Celera Corporation, or Celera Genomics, which was formally launched in 1998. Most of the government-sponsored sequencing was performed in twenty universities and research centers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Germany, Canada, and China.
The Human Genome Project originally aimed to map the nucleotides contained in a human haploid reference genome (more than three billion). The “genome” of any given individual is unique; mapping the “human genome” involved sequencing a small number of individuals and then assembling these together to get a complete sequence for each chromosome. Therefore, the finished human genome is thus a mosaic, not representing any one individual.