This month we are celebrating a new milestone of sequencing 50 Petabases of DNA. Large-scale sequencing projects have contributed to this achievement, providing us with unprecedented insights into human health and disease.
 
Every learning process has a beginning. A moment where you are unsure of whether you will achieve your goal and a moment of doubt. In music, most new learners start with scales — a series of notes that form the foundation of music and allow composers to build new melodies and harmonies.
 
At the Wellcome Sanger Institute, our beginning was in 1993 with the goal to sequence the human genome. A feat that was deemed impossible by both scientists and non-scientists around the world. Flash forward to 2024 and the impossible has happened — no not Oasis getting back together — but the human genome has already been sequenced and the Institute has now reached an exciting new milestone of sequencing 50 Petabases (Pb) of DNA.
 
50 Pb is fifty thousand trillion bases of DNA, which is the equivalent of sequencing over half a million gold-standard human genomes. Whilst this may seem like just a fancy number, we can learn a great deal from these sequences of bases. They can allow us to form the foundation of our understanding and build new possibilities for human health and disease. By continuing to scale up our projects, we can gain deeper insights and set ourselves new ‘impossible’ bars. It can always seem daunting at the beginning — but it is something we here at Sanger know how to do best.