Concept
The Genographic Project, launched on 13 April 2005 by the National Geographic Society and IBM, was a genetic anthropological study (sales discontinued on 31 May 2019) that aimed to map historical human migrations patterns by collecting and analyzing DNA samples. The final phase of the project was Geno 2.0 Next Generation. Upon retirement of the site, 1,006,542 participants in over 140 countries had joined the project. Created and led by project director Spencer Wells in 2005, the Genographic Project was a privately funded, not-for-profit collaboration between the National Geographic Society, IBM and the Waitt Foundation. Field researchers at eleven regional centers around the world began by collecting DNA samples from indigenous populations. Since the fall of 2015, the Project was led by Miguel Vilar. In fall 2012, the Genographic Project announced the completion of a new genotyping array, dedicated to genetic anthropology, called GenoChip. GenoChip is specifically designed for anthropological testing and includes SNPs from autosomal DNA, X-chromosome DNA, Y-chromosome DNA and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). The design of the new chip was a collaborative effort between Wells of National Geographic, Eran Elhaik of Johns Hopkins, Family Tree DNA, and Illumina. In the fall of 2015, a new chip was designed as a joint effort between Vilar, Genographic Lead Scientist, and Family Tree DNA. In the spring of 2019, it was announced that the Geno project had ended but results would remain available online until 2020. In July 2020 the site was retired. The autosomal admixture analysis developed by Wells and Elhaik classifies individuals by assessing their proportions of genomic ancestry related to nine ancestral regions: East Asian, Mediterranean, Southern African, Southwest Asian, Oceanian, Southeast Asian, Northern European, Sub-Saharan African and Native American. In 2016, the project began utilizing cutting-edge Helix DNA sequencing for Geno 2.0 Next Generation, the current phase of the Genographic Project.