The human Genome Project

The human Genome project was started in 1990 and was finished in 2003. It's aim was to sequence the 'euchromatic' regions of the genome, which make up 90% of the genome. The other region, called 'heterochromatic', which is found in centromeres and telomeres, is not sequenced by the project. In the process of the project 20 countries contributed to the project, including the US, UK, China, France, Japan and Germany.
The aim of the project was to identify the base pairs which make up the genome. The outcome of the sequencing was, that there are around 20500 genes in human beings and the scientists found that surprisingly many segmental duplications were occuring in the DNA, which we can also call repeats of DNA sequence.

This website is very interesting because i  tgives a summary of the Genome project and lists all the different methods they used to sequence the DNA:

http://search.proquest.com/openview/1dc75f11d4e2ceeda7c0125f3c469dd3/1?pq-origsite=gscholar

Shotgun sequencing is one of the methods which was under the most important ones to discover the base pairs. This type of sequencing is particularly efficient because it cuts the DNA into segments, which are then replicated in bacteria and afterwards the different parts of DNA are analysed and the base pairs aredetermined. Then scientific technologies can be prorammed to sort the base pairs and look for overlaps. In the diagram below is described the procedure precisely again: