June 26, 2000

Human Genome Project

Public and private teams announce draft human-genome sequences

Only 24% of the public sequence was completely finished, even as politicians celebrated the first draft at the White House.

26 June 2000: a ceremony for two rivals

At a White House ceremony on 26 June 2000, President Bill Clinton announced that the public Human Genome Project consortium had assembled a working draft of the human genome sequence; British prime minister Tony Blair participated by satellite from London.

Francis Collins represented the international public consortium and Craig Venter represented Celera Genomics. The ceremony recognized two separate achievements rather than one merged product: Celera announced its own first assembly using whole-genome shotgun sequencing, while the public consortium used a hierarchical shotgun approach based on mapped large fragments.

97% covered, 24% finished

The public consortium reported overlapping DNA fragments covering 97% of the genome, with sequence assembled for approximately 85% at a reported average accuracy of 99.9%. About half was in near-finished form or better, and 24% was completely finished.

The consortium emphasized that this was an intermediate draft containing gaps and ambiguities, not a finished genome sequence.

A milestone, not a data release

Public-project sequence data had been released continuously and freely as it was generated, so the day marked a milestone rather than the first opening of that data to researchers.

Neither project was finished. The public consortium moved into gap-filling and accuracy improvement, while both teams prepared separate peer-reviewed analyses published in Nature and Science in February 2001.

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