National Geographic, as part of its Genographic Project, tracks human migration across the millennia via DNA analysis

Validated on 12 Mar 2013

"With hundreds of thousands of samples, researchers could easily become lost in our collected data. But, by working with IBM, we can distill this information into something useful—research breakthroughs and new findings." - Dr. Spencer Wells, National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence and Scientific Director, the Genographic Project

Customer:
National Geographic

Industry:
Life Sciences

Deployment country:
United States

Solution:
Smarter Planet

Smarter Planet:
Smarter Healthcare

As one of the world’s largest nonprofit scientific and educational organizations, National Geographic has worked to advance understanding of the world’s cultural, historical and natural resources since its founding in 1888. The organization also seeks to reflect the world through its publications, television programming and radio broadcasts.

Business need:
Wanting to map human migratory patterns over the previous millennia, United States–based National Geographic teamed with IBM to launch the Genographic Project to gather DNA profiles of the world’s indigenous populations and hundreds of thousands of public volunteers. The team not only needed a solid technical founda­tion for the project itself, but the analytical know-how to find patterns in this massive amount of data.

Solution:
National Geographic and the IBM Computational Biology Center, with support from the Waitt Family Foundation, created a DNA analysis repository that lets researchers and scientists analyze gathered genetic data and identify patterns among the samples. Private citizens can also contribute samples to the DNA repository, hosted in an IBM DB2® data server, and view personalized ancestral migration profiles on the organization’s Web site.

Benefits:
Compiles the genetic information of more than 300,000 participants from all over the globe, supporting research innovations in migratory history; enhances understanding of mutation rates and DNA merging behavior, thanks to advanced trend mapping and analysis tools; establishes one of the largest centralized collections of genetic information, increasing collaboration among scientists and researchers.

IBM products and services that were used in this case study.

Hardware:
BladeCenter

Software:
DB2 Universal Database Enterprise Edition, WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere MQ

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