Scientists announce largest genetics project

Spread over the next three years, the "UK10K" programme, launched by the Wellcome Trust charity, will dwarf the original Human Genome Project.

Experts hope it will provide a much deeper picture of genetics than has emerged since the first draft of the genetic code, or genome, was published in June 2000.

One part of the 10.5m project will completely sequence the genomes of 4,000 people who have already been studied for many diseases and traits over many years.

Another will focus on the gene-containing regions of DNA from 6,000 people with extreme obesity, neurodevelopmental diseases, and other conditions.

Principal investigator Dr Richard Durbin, from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, Cambridgeshire, said: "Although genetics over the past five years has yielded a rich harvest of hundreds of variants associated with disease, much more remains to be discovered.

"We are seizing the chance to use technological advances in DNA sequencing to find variants that have even greater consequence for health."

The 2bn Human Genome Project was an achievement compared with landing men on the Moon.

It took a publicly-funded international team of scientists 10 years to complete the sequence of chemical patterns in DNA that make up the genetic code.

They found themselves in a race with American genetics privateer Dr Craig Venter, who produced his own version of the genome using a different approach.

In the end, both crossed the finishing line at the same time and published simultaneous results in the journals Nature and Science.

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President Bill Clinton announced the landmark achievement in a joint video address on June 26 2000.

Mr Clinton said: "It is now conceivable that our children's children will know the term cancer only as a constellation of stars."

But progress made since has shown he was being wildly over-optimistic. Despite big advances in technology, allowing genomes to be sequenced far faster and more cheaply than was possible 10 years ago, scientists are still scratching the surface of the world of genetics.

The new study is part of an ongoing effort to investigate the genome in more detail and uncover more of its secrets.

The 4,000 genome element will come from two groups of volunteers comprising the TwinsUK and Alspac (Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children) groups. Alspac includes more than 9,000 people originally from Avon in the south-west whose health and progress has been monitored from birth in 1991-92. TwinsUK consists of 11,000 twins born in the UK, some of whom have taken part in studies for more than 18 years.

Studying these individuals will help researchers build a near-complete catalogue of genetic variations that can be tied to health effects.

Information from the second group will strengthen the findings about the genetic causes of disorders including severe obesity, autism, schizophrenia and congenital heart disease.