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Fifteen years ago, as a member of the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium, Burton managed one of the high-throughput production teams at the Sanger Centre. “The Human Genome Project (HGP) was a fantastic piece of work to be involved in, and we always felt that we were helping to leave a worthwhile legacy,” he says. Altogether, researchers from more than 40 institutions took part in this international effort, led by MIT’s Eric Lander.
The publicly funded consortium had commercial competition from Craig Venter and his company Celera, however, and in February 2001, both groups published first drafts of the human genome sequence. The consortium’s work appeared in Nature, and Celera’s article was published in Science the next day. Fifteen years and thousands of citations later, how have these landmark papers affected some of the more than 500 people on the author lists?
For many, the HGP marked the beginning of a career in genomics. Aoife McLysaght was a PhD student at Trinity College Dublin at the time, looking for whole-genome duplications in animals at the base of the vertebrate evolutionary tree. Now a professor of genetics at Trinity, she studies evolutionary constraints on gene dosage.
The project also motivated Andy Mungall and Bill Majoros, who were both inspired to start PhD programs after working on the sequencing efforts.
The project also helped Kimmen Sjölander, who developed algorithms to assign genes to functional subfamilies while at Celera. “The paper in Science increased my visibility, allowing me to return to academia.” Sjölander is now at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studies the evolutionary development of new functions and structures across protein superfamilies.
A few years ago, Kevin McKernan’s company Medicinal Genomics sequenced the cannabis genome, to better understand the plant’s pharmaceutical potential. McKernan has been involved in genomics for years.
Read full, original post: Life After Sequencing
