The African BioGenome Project, or AfricaBP, is an international effort to sequence the genomes of all animals, all plants, all fungi, and all

protists A protist () is any eukaryotic organism (that is, an organism whose cells contain a cell nucleus) that is not an animal, plant, or fungus. While it is likely that protists share a common ancestor (the last eukaryotic common ancestor), the excl ...

(and so, collectively, all

eukaryotes Eukaryotes () are organisms whose cells have a nucleus. All animals, plants, fungi, and many unicellular organisms, are Eukaryotes. They belong to the group of organisms Eukaryota or Eukarya, which is one of the three domains of life. Bacte ...

) that are

native Native may refer to: People * Jus soli, citizenship by right of birth * Indigenous peoples, peoples with a set of specific rights based on their historical ties to a particular territory ** Native Americans (disambiguation) In arts and entert ...

to Africa at an estimated cost of $1 billion

U.S. dollars The United States dollar (symbol: $; code: USD; also abbreviated US$ or U.S. Dollar, to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies; referred to as the dollar, U.S. dollar, American dollar, or colloquially buck) is the official ...

. The project prioritizes doing its sequencing work and data storage within the African continent.

Background

The project was originally started by a group of scientists including

ThankGod Echezona Ebenezer ThankGod Echezona Ebenezer is a Nigerian bioinformatician. Career Ebenezer is from southwestern Nigeria. He earned a Ph.D. from Churchill College at the University of Cambridge. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher under Wilfried Haerty a ...

, and has partnered with other major sequencing efforts such as the Vertebrate Genomes Project and the 10,000 Plant Genomes Project.

References

{{bioinformatics-stub Genome projects Genomics Bioinformatics