NEW DELHI — Researchers have released a draft of the first human pangenome – a new, usable reference for genomics that combines the genetic material of 47 individuals from different ancestral backgrounds to allow for a deeper, more accurate understanding of worldwide genomic diversity. The pangenome was produced by the Human Pangenome Reference Consortium (HPRC), a government-funded collaboration between more than a dozen research institutions in the United States and Europe, launched in 2019. By adding 119 million bases – “letters” in DNA sequences – to the existing genomics reference, the pangenome represents human genetic diversity not possible with a single reference genome. The researchers from the Rockefeller University, US, involved in the project called the single reference genome a “flawed tool”. One of its biggest problems, they said, was that about 70 per cent of its data came from a single man of predominantly African-European background whose DNA was sequenced during the Human Genome Project, the first effort to capture all of a person’s DNA. As a result, they said, it can tell us little about the 0.2 to one per cent of genetic sequence that makes each of the seven billion people on this planet different from each...