NEWS – Department of Biotechnology announced the completion of the Genome India Project — the largest initiative to conduct sequencing of 10,000 genomes of the Indian population

HIGHLIGHTS

• While India first sequenced a complete human genome in 2006, creating a database that is representative of India’s population diversity is seen as a key step to being able to learn about genetic variants that are unique to India’s population groups and use that to customise drugs and therapies
• About 20 institutions across India are involved in the project with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru and the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad being the lead institutions coordinating the project
• The Indian population of 1.3 billion consists of over 4,600 population groups, and many of them are endogamous. These factors have contributed to the genetic diversity of the current population. Thus, the Indian population harbours distinct variations and often many disease-causing mutations are amplified within some of these groups
• There are harmful mutations that are less prevalent in the world but located in endogamous groups at a high frequency [relative to their population] in India
• The main outcomes of such an enterprise would be to gain deeper insight into India’s population diversity, improve diagnostic methods and medical counselling, find genetic predispositions to disease, develop personalised and customisable drugs, improve gene therapy and throw more light on individual susceptibility to infectious disease
• The United Kingdom, China, and the United States are among the countries that have programmes to sequence at least 1,00,000 of their genomes