One of the most ambitious research undertakings of the past few decades, the complete sequencing of the Human genome was announced on 27 May of 2021 by the Telomere-to-Telomere (TAT) Consortium, which involved dozens of scientists from 30+ institutions.

     1st announced in 2003 and using shotgun-sequencing, there was a sizable portion of the heterochromatic genome was inaccessible to sequencing. These highly repetitive DNA sequences have now been defined and added nearly 200 million base pairs to the human genome 3.055 billion base pair database including 115 new genes that predicted to code for protein. The more complete Human genome is based upon a single European individual.

     There’s work still to be done. For one, the current version of the genome represents a single person. The T2T team, now merged with the Human Pangenome Reference Center at Washington University, is working to add more diverse sequences to their database — so the human genome may yet contain further surprises.