the human genome is fully mapped, but who’s genome is this?

Question

There are differences between everyone’s genome, so when the human genome was mapped, who were they basing it off of?

In: 99

Answer 1

I think you are misunderstanding what it means to map a genome.
To keep it in the realm of eli5, let’s pretend that there are 1 million pairs of chromosomes.
Pair number 15 identifies whether you have blue eyes or brown. It doesn’t matter which chromosome the individual has, it still maps the same.
My DNA may have a blue chromosome and your DNA may have a brown chromosome in the 15th pair, however we are both members of the same map.
So you seem to be hung up on which exact chromosome each individual person has. Which exact one you have isn’t important, what’s important is that it’s mapped correctly and we know which ones it’s possible for you to have and what they mean. That’s what it means to map our genome.