IHGSC is the acronym for the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium, the public consortium that sequenced the human genome.
The consortium coordinated government-funded laboratories and sequencing centres across several countries. Its work formed the public side of the Human Genome Project, alongside a separate privately funded effort led by Celera Genomics. The consortium divided sequencing responsibilities among participating centres and released sequence data openly to researchers.
The group published its landmark draft sequence and analysis in Nature in 2001. It later reported a substantially improved euchromatic sequence, and the public project was declared complete in 2003. The consortium’s achievement depended on physical mapping, large-scale DNA sequencing, computational assembly and quality checking.
IHGSC is easy to confuse with HUGO, the Human Genome Organisation, which helped coordinate international discussion and policy but was not the name of the sequencing consortium. ENCODE was a later project studying functional elements in the genome, while INSDC refers to international nucleotide sequence databases.