utenzi

Mapping the Origins of Human Migration The Genographic Project is a collaborative project with The National Geographic Society, IBM, and the Waitt Family Foundation being the principal backers. The purpose is to establish what the routes were by which humans populated the planet. As you've probably noticed, we humans can be found pretty much anywere you look--for better or worse--but at some point in time we were in just one place. So, how did we get from that one place to being a plague on the planet everywhere? This project, initially funded with $40 million(US) of private funds, takes buccal samples (swab of cheek cells) from indigenous populations worldwide. The project started in April 2005 and is slated to finish in 2010. Unique to this project is the ability for private individuals to add their buccal samples to the database albeit at a cost of $100(US). These collected cheek cells will be processed which involves DNA extraction, amplification, sequencing, and bioinformati...