Ball, M.P. et al. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 109, 11920–11927 (2012).

Now that routine personal genome sequencing is in the realm of the possible, the next big question is how to treat and interpret the resulting data. The more information on an individual's health, environment and traits that can be added to sequence data, the more in-depth the interpretation of genomic variation will be. Just how useful additional information is can now be tested with a public resource of ten genomes associated with health information for each participant, organized by Ball et al. as part of the Personal Genome Project (PGP). The PGP will also add data on expression, epigenome and microbiome profiling and will generate induced pluripotent stem cells. The ten individuals were selected from a large pool of volunteers and agreed to open consent after being counseled on the risks of loss of privacy.