Project to map DNA of 1,000 people around the world

Any two people may be roughly 99 per cent identical at the genetic level. But scientists plan to map the DNA of 1,000 people worldwide to examine their differences.

The goal — To create a catalog of these differences, the most detailed yet, that scientists could mine to find variations that help explain why some people get certain illnesses and others do not.

The international project was announced on Tuesday. It will be a collaboration of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Britain, the US National Institutes of Health and China’s Beijing Genomics Institute Shenzhen.