Interviewee: Craig Venter. Craig Venter, the leader of the private genome effort at Celera Genomics, talks about the sources of the DNA used in their sequence. (DNAi Location: Genome > The project > Players > Private project > The private project's DNA donors)

We chose three females and two males, and we had people of self-described ethnic backgrounds as African, American, Hispanic, Chinese and Caucasian. Obviously I was one of the Caucasians. The 27 million sequences that we generated at Celera were a combination from libraries made from these five different individuals. One sequence more than the others comprised the basic sequence, because we were worried about the polymorphic variation, the changes in, you know, one genetic code versus the other that could complicate our assembly. And so we wanted to make sure that instead of having equal numbers from all the people, that we had one sequence that was more derived from one individual, so we'd be assured that the mathematics would work.

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