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

I agree with Simon. I'll be that Elizabeth Blackburn would disagree
that these repetitive sequences (if they are indeed on or near
telomeres) are "junk DNA". They may just prove to be the key to
longevity. Maybe someone knows if she has opined on any of this.

On Dec 2, 11:04 am, Simon Quellen Field <sfi...@scitoys.com> wrote:
> It would seem to me that the length of some repeats could actually be quite
> important. Of course telomere length is one, since it seems to be related to
> longevity and cancer. But other repeat lengths might also change the three
> dimensional structure of the chromosome, making some genes more or less
> available for expression. This might make the difference between healthy
> function and unhealthy disfunction, or between normal and exceptional in
> something like intelligence or athletic ability.
>
> Besides the benefits of having different technologies confirm one another,
> this is one of the benefits of technologies that can read a whole genome in
> sequence without the need for assemblers.
>
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> On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 11:42 PM, Patrik <patr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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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