Not an expert but they used multiple volunteers to build a consensus sequence. Which is basically taking the most common/prevalent fragment. It’s also misleading when someone says two human genomes differ by 0.1% only since it’s 0.1% of around 3 billion base pairs so roughly 3 million bp which by itself is a huge number and can help explain a lot of differences.
Would also like to add that post HGP(which ended in 2003 and the produced sequence was filled with gaps) we have sequenced a lot more individual genomes and the variance is now accepted to be around 0.3%-0.4%. If you’re interested, you could look into the recent publication of gapless human genome.
shadestark11 t1_ivfhd3i wrote
Reply to If the Human Genome Project represents a map of the genome of a few individuals, why is this relevant to humans as a whole if everybody has different genetics? by bjardd
Not an expert but they used multiple volunteers to build a consensus sequence. Which is basically taking the most common/prevalent fragment. It’s also misleading when someone says two human genomes differ by 0.1% only since it’s 0.1% of around 3 billion base pairs so roughly 3 million bp which by itself is a huge number and can help explain a lot of differences.
Would also like to add that post HGP(which ended in 2003 and the produced sequence was filled with gaps) we have sequenced a lot more individual genomes and the variance is now accepted to be around 0.3%-0.4%. If you’re interested, you could look into the recent publication of gapless human genome.
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/researchers-generate-first-complete-gapless-sequence-human-genome