Thirteen anonymous donors provided DNA for the original Human Genome Project reference genome.
The donors were recruited in Buffalo, New York, through advertisements in The Buffalo News in March 1997. The project initially invited ten men and ten women to provide blood samples. After genetic counselling and sample processing, DNA resources from thirteen anonymous volunteers contributed to the reference assembly.
The resulting reference genome is not the complete genome of one individual. It is a haploid mosaic assembled from DNA fragments supplied by multiple people, which makes it a useful coordinate system for comparing genomes but not a perfect representation of every human population. Donor identities were protected from both researchers and the public.
The contribution was also highly uneven. About 80 percent of the original reference sequence came from eight people, and one anonymous male donor, identified by the code RP11, supplied roughly two-thirds of the sequence. This is why descriptions of the reference genome can mention both thirteen donors and a dominant single donor. The later GRCh assemblies refined the reference, while the 2022 T2T-CHM13 assembly used a different source cell line.