Re: Has the human genome been completely sequenced? (even the heterochromatin)

You're right, there are still areas around the centromeres and
telomeres which are really hard to sequence and assemble correctly,
because they consist mainly of highly repetitive sequence. However,
because they are so repetitive, there's also very few active genes
there, *and* the repeat copy numbers tend to vary some from person to
person.

So yes, there are still some gaps. But it would take a lot of effort
to close them and in the end it might not tell you that much more
anyway - do you really care if person A has 27 copies of a repeat in
that region, whereas person B only has 26 copies?

Heterochromatin - it's the new "junk DNA" :-D. Who knows; perhaps once
we understand it better, it might turn out just as non-junk as the old
"junk DNA". But for now, it's considered a fairly thankless area to
put much effort into.

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