Tiago R. Magalhaes from G42 Healthcare in the United Arab Emirates presented at London Calling 2023 on “The Emirati Genome Project: where long reads became an integral part of large genome projects (a first!). G42 now has hospitals, clinical diagnostics, and a genomics program. Magalhaes noted that the organization has several hospitals. They also spoke about the history of Abu Dhabi and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The Emirati Genome Project has the ambitious goal of sequencing at 30x one million nationals in the United Arab Emirates by 2025! Magalhaes explained that the UAE is the sixth country with the highest birth defects. A slide indicated that Nanopore, Illumina, and MGI are involved in this initiative. Magalhaes explained that one million people and genomes requires multiple partners: volunteers, pharma & biotech, clinical population genomics, and research. Rich electronic documentation services allow deep connections with genome data. The project started with long reads and has 41 PromethIONs, 41 A100S, 47000 samples/year, and 17 scientists! The team has learned and moved to different chemistries and updated basecalling to Dorado. They are using Sniffles2 and recovered structural variants now in thousands of samples. Now they have the first structural variants mapping of the Emirati population. Magalhaes emphasized that the people who did this were mostly the volunteers!
