Ensembl and the 1000 Genomes

Today the 1000 Genomes projects was announced. By any measure this is a big deal.

The goal is simple: to create the most comprehensive and medically useful collection of human variation ever assembled by producing approximately 6 terabases of sequence. To put this amount of data in prospective, 6 terabases is more than 60 times the amount of data that is currently available in the DDBJ/GenBank/EMBL Archive and that took more than 25 years to collect. At the peak production of the 1000 Genomes project more that 8 billion basepairs per day will be sequenced. It's data output of the the entire human genome project every week. All made publicly available.

The data generation rate and the short read length mean that the bioinformatics requires for the project are equally ambitious (or terrifying depending on your point of view). The EBI and NCBI, working together, are creating a joint DCC (data coordination centre) to collect, organise and provide the data to the world. Steve Sherry at the NCBI and I are eager to take this on.

At Ensembl we've been expecting this development and built support for re-sequencing data into our variation database a couple of years ago. So far, we have data for about 6 humans, 5 mouse strains, and a smattering of rat data. Small stuff compared to six months from now, but large enough that we have both experience and confidence dealing with the large-scale resequencing data. We are probably going to need both.

Check out more at http://www.1000genomes.org