Illumina, a biotechnology company based in San Diego, California, announced on 6 February that it has sequenced the complete genome of an African man.

Scientists have already sequenced the genomes of two Caucasian men and one Chinese man, but Illumina's is the first African genome. It came from an anonymous Yoruban man from Nigeria.

Comparing the data from these four genomes might theoretically yield insights into human diversity. But data from only two of them have been publicly released — those of the scientists James Watson and Craig Venter — and only Venter's genome has been described in a formal publication.

The Illumina announcement came two days before company scientists unveiled their data at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology conference in Marco Island, Florida.