RACIAL barriers have toppled at a very elite club. Two anonymous men, one Han Chinese, the other Yoruban from Nigeria, have become the first non-white, non-celebrities to have their full genomes sequenced.
Until now, geneticists Craig Venter and James Watson were the only individuals whose full genomes were known. This week, research teams led by Jun Wang of the in Shenzhen, China, and David Bentley of in Essex, UK, published the genomes of the Chinese man and Nigerian man respectively, in the journal Nature ( and ). Both used the latest technology to break up the DNA and sequence tens of millions of fragments in just a few weeks.
Although we now have entire sequences from three major racial groups, it is too early to work out whether disparities between the genomes reflect individual variation or group differences. That will require more genome sequences from these groups.
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