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Comment by banjo_milkman

They are talking about one 'reference genome'. The variation from human-to-human is relatively small (a few million bases out of 3 billion). The reference genome has historically been some kind of average/mosaic of several individuals (this has obvious disadvantages), good enough to put reads in the right place (mostly), and call 'variants' - the differences that make the test genome unique.

The latest/greatest end-to-end T2T reference is entirely based on 'HG002' an individual from Utah, due partly to new information derived from long read technologies.

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