An international consortium of researchers has sequenced the genomes of more than 1000 people, providing a roadmap for studying the genetic basis of human disease.
Richard Wilson directs the Washington University Genome Institute, which participated in the 1000 Genomes Project.
“We would love to sequence the genomes of 1000 people with diabetes and 1000 people who come from similar ethnic groups but yet don’t have diabetes. Right? And then to start to understand really what are the differences in everybody’s genomes that might underlie that disease,” Wilson said.
He says researchers identified rare genetic variants that may eventually explain why some people are more susceptible to certain diseases like cancer or Alzheimers.
And Wilson says they started to build a global infrastructure for sharing and analyzing genetic data.
“We didn’t know how to share huge amounts of DNA-sequence information,” Wilson said. “ We really didn’t have the methods to do the deep analysis. So this has not only been doing a bunch of sequencing, but really understanding how to build a better infrastructure and build the tools we need to do that kind of analysis.”
Wilson says recent advances in DNA-sequencing technology have made this kind of research possible.