Genomic Map of Poland

Activities carried out within the Polish Roadmap for Research Infrastructures allowed the European Centre of Bioinformatics and Genomics to make a financial contribution of PLN 104 million on the development of the Genomic Map of Poland. This innovative project is realized thanks to the financial support of Information Processing Institute as implementing institution for the IV Priority Axis of the Operational Programme Smart Growth 2014-2020. It assumes the sequencing of whole human genomes of about 5000 inhabitants from all over the country. Then, based on these genomes, the Genomic Map will be created serving as a specific genetic pattern (the so-called reference genome) of people from a given region of Poland.

The implementation and results of this project will allow Poland to join a very few and prestigious group of countries all over the world, such as the USA, South Korea, Japan and Great Britain, in which similar projects have already been launched or realized. In this context, it should be emphasized that the project of the Genomic Map of Poland is particularly important for basic research and for the growth of modern methods currently used in medicine such as personalized medicine or precision medicine, which are among the fastest growing areas of science in the modern world. Nowadays, we know that despite genomic similarity between two people above 99%, knowledge about the genome of a local population is of major importance not only in theory but also for practical purposes. In the case of genetic diseases, often single mutations are responsible for difficulties in detecting a disease. This is why it is so important to prepare a scientific description of a Genomic Map for a particular population group that will serve as a benchmark in biological and medical research, where seeking individualized treatment for patients is one of the goals.

It should also be stressed that a necessary condition for conducting all current genetic high quality research is the involvement of significant computational resources and the support of advanced algorithms, at any stage of biological data processing and further data analysis. Hence, the project of the Genomic Map of Poland requires the participation and cooperation of experts in the fields of bioinformatics, biology, chemistry and computer science as well.