The Garvan Institute of Medical Research has today launched the world’s largest publicly available ‘genome bank’ containing the genetic information of healthy older people. The Medical Genome Reference Bank is an initiative of the Kinghorn Centre for Clinical Genomics (Garvan) and NSW Health.
The ‘genome bank’ contains information about the genome sequence of 1200 healthy aged Australians. Given it only contains the genomes of individuals over the age of 70 who have no history of major disease (cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative disease or cancer), the ‘genome bank’ is expected to be relatively free of genetic variants associated with disease. This makes it a powerful filter, or ‘control’, for accelerating genomic discovery. It will also help in the diagnosis of genetic diseases and provide insights to the mechanisms of healthy ageing.
The resource is available to medical researchers worldwide.
Read the full story here at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research website.
Go to the Medical Genome Reference Bank.
