Understanding the relationship between genotype and phenotype is one of the central goals in biology and medicine. The reference human genome sequence1 provides a foundation for the study of human genetics, but systematic investigation of human variation requires full knowledge of DNA sequence variation across the entire spectrum of allele frequencies and types of DNA differences. Substantial progress has already been made. By 2008 the public catalogue of variant sites (dbSNP 129) contained approximately 11 million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and 3 million short insertions and deletions (indels)2-4. Databases of structural variants (SVs) (e.g., dbVAR) indexed the locations of large genomic variants. The International HapMap Project catalogued both allele frequencies and the correlation patterns between nearby variants, a phenomenon known as linkage disequilibrium (LD), across several populations for 3.5 million SNPs3, 4.
