Open-source human genomes

Yesterday, during a World Science Festival panel on human origins and why our species outlasted other species of Homo, geneticist Ed Green mentioned that there were thousands of sequenced human genomes, from all over the world, that had been made publicly available. Our code is open source.

But where do you go to find it? Several folks on Twitter had great suggestions and I wanted to share them here.

The 1000 Genomes Project—organized by researchers at the Wellcome Trust, the National Institutes of Health, and Harvard—is working on sequencing the genomes of 2500 individuals. The data they've already collected is available online. Read a Nature article about The 1000 Genomes Project: Data management and community access.

The Personal Genome Project is interactive. Created by a researcher at Harvard Medical School, the program is aimed at enrolling 100,000 well-informed volunteers who will have their genomes sequenced and linked to anonymized medical data. Everything that's collected will be Creative Commons licensed for public use.

The University of California Santa Cruz Genome Browser is a great place to find publicly available genomes and sequences.

Thanks to Eva Rose, Aatish Bhatia, and Edward Banatt.