In what year was Celera’s private human-genome project formally launched? The answer is 1998.
Celera Genomics was established in May 1998 by PE Corporation, later known as Applera, with J. Craig Venter as its first president. The company set out to sequence and assemble the human genome using private funding and a whole-genome shotgun strategy, directly challenging the publicly funded Human Genome Project.
Celera’s plan relied on sequencing many randomly selected DNA fragments and using computers to assemble overlapping pieces. That approach had already worked on smaller genomes, but applying it to the roughly three-billion-base human genome was ambitious. Celera also benefited from publicly available sequence and mapping information deposited in databases such as GenBank.
The project intensified the public-versus-private “race” to finish the genome. Celera announced a target of completing its work by 2001, while the public consortium accelerated its schedule. The two efforts jointly presented draft human-genome results in 2001. Thus, 1998 refers to Celera’s launch, not the Human Genome Project’s start in 1990 or the publication of the draft results in 2001.