The Human Genome Project

  1: What is the public project for sequencing the human genome?
  2: Has the human genome been completely sequenced?
  3: How many genes do humans have?
  4: Why is it so difficult to find the genes in a human genome sequence?
  5: Where did the sequenced human DNA come from?
  6: Is the human genome “freely available”? If not, who owns it?
  7: Why was there a Human Genome Project What is its use?
  8: Who were the members of the international consortium What was the role of each of them?
  9: What was the French contribution to the Human Genome Project?
  10: How much did the Human Genome Project cost?
  11: With the end of the Human Genome Project, are the large sequencing centers still useful?

  The international consortium for the sequencing of the human genome included 20 sequencing centers in six countries (Germany, China, United States, France, Japan, United Kingdom). Here is the list:

Other institutes and sequencing centers, although there were not officially part of the consortium, also contributed in a substantial manner to the sequencing effort for the human genome. Here are some of the most important contributors:

Finally, three institutions played a crucial role in the project in terms of bioinformatics:

With its neighbor, the Sanger Institute, the EBI created the Ensembl (e!) project, which performs an automatic search for genes in a sequence of the human genome and permits “navigation” over the length of this “annotated” sequence. UCSC has developed a similar navigator.

The centers which participated in the sequencing of the human genome selected chromosomes or chromosomal regions of different sizes, depending on their capacity. Their respective contributions (measured as percentage of non-redundant finished sequence present in the databases at the beginning of 2003) are shown below:

The contributions of the 6 countries implicated in the project are the following: