On Jan. 22, 2008, an international research consortium announced the 1000 Genomes Project, an ambitious effort that involved sequencing the genomes of at least a thousand people from around the world to create the most detailed and medically useful picture to date of human genetic variation.

The project received major support from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, England, the Beijing Genomics Institute, Shenzhen in China and the National Human Genome Research Institute in the U.S.