NCC - Genome of Europe (1+MG)

The Genome of Europe is part of the 1+MG EU initiative to collect 1 Million WGS samples and make these accessible for research and clinical applications. Within this project, the Working Group called Genome of Europe planned for half of these samples, 500k, to be taken from reference populations, biobanks and cohorts. The EU funded project (also called Genome of Europe, GoE from here onwards) is funded to sequence the first 100.000 of this initiative. By country population size, the Netherlands will contribute 5.000 samples, which we currently envision to be split across LifeLines (~1500), Rotterdam Study (~2000) and HELIUS (~1500), to broadly represent the Dutch population. These sequencing will be done with Illumina short-read technology to about 30x average WGS coverage (so-called “clinical-grade”). In addition, we aim to sequence another 1.000 samples with long-read sequencing technology (Oxford Nanopore, most likely) to equivalent coverage, but these samples have additional requirements on sample collection, storage and processing, which have not been worked out in full detail yet.