On Aug. 23. 2023, researchers co-led by University of California, Santa Cruz Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Karen Miga, announced announced that the genome of the Y chromosome had been fully sequenced, a feat that finally completes the set of end-to-end human chromosomes and adds 30 million new bases to the human genome reference, mostly from challenging-to-sequence satellite DNA.

The study was published in the journal Nature. The complete, annotated Y chromosome reference is available for use on the UCSC Genome Browser and can be accessed via Github.