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Kandiru t1_ishbuwl wrote

It's no one person's. It's a mishmash of several different high quality genomes, and then over time it's been changed to have the more common variants as the reference rather than the reference being a rare mutation for some genes.

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promonk t1_ishdkr1 wrote

When you say "more common variants," common in what way?

I'm fascinated by the idea of a "reference human."

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Kandiru t1_ishg2ww wrote

Say a certain position is a A for 90% of people, but a C for 10%. The A variant is more common than the C.

So when the reference had previously had a C there, in a later version it's often been changed to the most frequent base.

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promonk t1_ishu3eb wrote

I get that. What I'm curious about is sampling. 90% of which population? Is it 90 of some college-age kids being paid a hundred bucks for a cheek swab? Or is it drawn from a broad swathe of demographics and locations?

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tsunamisurfer t1_ishsh54 wrote

Originally though, the reference genome was that of the first sequenced human genome, which I believe belonged to J Craig Venter.

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Kandiru t1_isim3ny wrote

Actually there were two competing approaches at the beginning. Venter did sequence himself with shotgun sequencing, while the high fidelity BAC sequencing with Sanger sequencing was done on a range of different individuals spanning the genome.

So the first version of the reference was a mixture of them all.

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Angdrambor t1_isjtnw2 wrote

What makes a genome "High quality"?

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danby t1_islg7bo wrote

Though I only spent a handful of years in genome sequencing I suspect what is probably meant here is that the sequence was based on several genomes where they were able to prepare high quality genomic libraries for those genomes.

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Angdrambor t1_ismpsxm wrote

What makes a genomic library high or low quality? Few errors? Faithful representation of the original?

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