On Nov 8, 2024, researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute celebrated a milestone of sequencing 50 Petabases of DNA. Large-scale sequencing projects have contributed to this achievement, providing us with unprecedented insights into human health and disease.

The Wellcome Sanger Institute began in 1993 with the goal to sequence the human genome. A feat that was deemed impossible by both scientists and non-scientists around the world. Flash forward to 2024 and the impossible has happened, but the human genome has already been sequenced and the Institute has now reached an exciting new milestone of sequencing 50 Petabases (Pb) of DNA.

50 Pb is fifty thousand trillion bases of DNA, which is the equivalent of sequencing over half a million gold-standard human genomes. Whilst this may seem like just a fancy number, we can learn a great deal from these sequences of bases. The study was published in Nature.