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The Human Genome Project (HGP) is a project undertaken in 1990. The goal of the HGP was to understand the genetic makeup of the human species by identifying all the genes in the human genome and mapping how individual genes are sequenced. By some definitions the HGP was completed in 2005.
Most of the research for the Human Genome Project was done by an international public HGP, with some research done independently by a private company Celera Genomics. The HGP was originally aimed at the more than three billion nucleotides contained in a haploid reference human genome. Recently several groups have announced efforts to extend this to diploid human genomes including the International HapMap Project, Applied Biosystems, Perlegen, Illumina, JCVI, Personal Genome Project, and Roche-454. The "genome" of any given individual (except for identical twins and cloned animals) is unique; mapping "the human genome" involves sequencing multiple variations of each gene. The project did not study all of the DNA found in human cells; some heterochromatic areas (about 8% of the total) remain unsequenced.