Human Genome Project (HGP)

The international Human Genome Project (HGP) was formally launched in 1990 as a large, coordinated international effort and took thirteen years to complete. The genome it set out to sequence, the human genome, is roughly twenty-five times larger than the genome of any organism that had been fully sequenced before it, and it stands as the first vertebrate genome ever completed; the human genome is estimated to contain approximately 3 x 10^9 (three billion) base pairs of DNA. Because a project of this scale generated far more sequence data than could realistically be analysed by earlier methods, the HGP was closely tied to, and directly accelerated, the rapid growth of an entirely new field within …