Rosalind Franklin's X-ray diffraction photograph of DNA, 1953. Photo courtesy of HarperCollins.

Here we describe 63.8 million base pairs of highly accurate finished sequence representing 99.9% of the euchromatin portion of the chromosome.

Manual curation of gene loci reveals 1,461 protein-coding genes and 321 pseudogenes. Nearly one quarter of the genes belong to large tandemly arranged gene families that cover more than 25% of the total chromosome size. The evolutionary landscape is extremely diverse and reveals a chromosome composed of regions of large blocks of 1:1 gene orthology with rodents, scattered regions with more recent gene family expansions/deletions, and segments of both coding and non-coding conservation with the distant fish species Takifugu.

Publication: The DNA sequence and biology of human chromosome 19. Nature 428, 529-535 (April 1, 2004)

General project/clone information: JGI Human Genome Project page