1000 genomes project
dgmacarthur | May 8, 2009It's difficult to distill down a meeting as data-rich as the Cold Spring Harbor Biology of Genomes meeting, but here's a first-pass attempt.
We're sequencing lots of peopleOne of the highlights of the meeting was the update on progress from the 1000 Genomes (1KG) Project. I was fortunate enough to have been given a sneak peek at the data at the 1KG satellite meeting earlier in the week (which you can download yourself if you're so inclined), but it was still impressive to see it all put together in the presentation today by Goncalo Abecasis.
Abecasis reported on the data emerging from the…
dgmacarthur | February 15, 2009[Added in edit in response to concerned emails: The original title was deliberately provocative, and contrary to the message in the text; I apologise for any misunderstanding. I've largely rewritten the post to make my point more clearly.]
One of the curious and paradoxical effects of Big Genetics projects like the 1000 Genomes Project - which plans to generate low-coverage whole-genome sequences for ~1,500 people by the end of this year, providing a map of human genetic variation of unprecedented resolution - is that while they considerably accelerate research in the long term, they can…
dgmacarthur | January 14, 2009
Olivia Judson's blog has a guest post by Aaron Hirsh that got me thinking about a topic that will be familiar to most scientists: the transition of research towards Big Science. Big Science basically includes any project involving a large consortium of research groups working together on a tightly-defined problem, usually with a very specific goal in mind (e.g. sequence and analyse a genome, or build a big machine to smash particles together at high speed).
Hirsh only mentions genetics in passing, but this field - and particularly human genetics - is an area where the trend towards Big…
dgmacarthur | November 14, 2008Last week I posted on the publication of three papers in Nature describing whole-genome sequencing using next-generation technology: one African genome, one Asian genome, and two genomes from a female cancer patient (one from her cancer cells and one from healthy skin tissue). At the end of that post I noted that the era of the single-genome publication is drawing to a close as the age of population genomics commences.
Today GenomeWeb News reports from the American Society of Human Genetics meeting on the biggest current foray into the field of population genomics: the 1000 Genomes Project.…