The Human Genome Project was designed to map and sequence the human genome.
A genome is an organism’s complete set of genetic material. For humans, the project focused on locating genes on chromosomes, constructing physical and genetic maps, and determining the order of roughly three billion DNA base pairs. Mapping helped establish where genomic features lay; sequencing read the underlying DNA letters.
The project was a publicly funded international effort led principally by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and Department of Energy, with major contributions from research centres in the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Germany and China. A working draft was announced in 2000, and the project’s completion was announced in April 2003.
The target was not the human proteome, which is the collection of proteins made by cells, nor a mouse genome or yeast transcriptome. Those are related biological subjects, but they answer different questions. The resulting reference sequence became a foundation for studying inherited disease, evolution, gene regulation and human genetic variation.