Scientists have begun an ambitious five-year project to collect DNA samples from more than 100,000 people around the world to use them to create a virtual family tree of the genetic connections among humans, project organizers said on Wednesday.
The Genographic Project has assembled an international team of scientists at 10 locations under the auspices of the National Geographic Society and IBM to better understand how modern humans migrated from their ancestral home in Africa. The aim is to create the largest-ever database of human genetic information.
"We all care about our roots, but this is really going far back," National Geographic Society President John Fahey said.
Researchers have surprisingly little genetic information to work with to confirm oral histories of ancient migrations or to fully understand the origins of today's ethnic groups and cultures, said project leader Spencer Wells, a population geneticist at the society.
"We have a vague sense of some of these patterns, and we can speculate on what these patterns tell us" but "we really don't have the kind of sampling we need," he said.
"What we're doing is inviting the entire world to participate."
Researchers involved in the decade-long Human Genome Project, which completed a preliminary map of the human genome in 2003, had intended as a companion effort to map human genetic origins.
But that effort bogged down over accusations of racism and commercial exploitation of indigenous people, which limited the cooperation of groups necessary for its success.
The core of the Genographic Project is a field effort to collect 100,000 samples from indigenous communities around the world. Those communities are "absolutely key to the success of this project," Wells said, because their genetic markers are the most reliable indicators of shared human lineage, and because their cultures are under threat from migration and intermixing.
"There's a real sense of urgency in the work that we're doing," said Ted Waitt, whose Waitt Family Foundation is financing the multimillion-dollar field effort.
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