Abstract

The Human Genome Project (HGP) was launched in 1990 as the world’s largest collaborative biological project to determine the three billion base pairs that make up human DNA . It was completed in 2003 with 92% of the genome completed, and at a cost of $2.7 billion. Since then, thousands of genomes have been sequenced at much greater speed and at much reduced cost of $600 (or less); the total amount of data runs in the order of petabytes (millions of gigabytes).

The UK10K Cohorts Project was an early project (2010-2015) based on whole-genome sequence data from almost 4,000 individuals to research the relationship between rare and common genetic variants with a comprehensive set of quantitative measures that are relevant to cardiovascular and metabolic disease. The largest whole-genome sequence project to date is UK BioBank (https://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk/) with whole-genome sequence data for 500,000 individuals that can be linked to a wide range of biochemistry markers, online questionnaires, electronic health-related records and MR imaging data.