Interviewee: Jim Kent. The data structure of the human genome: poetry or prose?

Then another thing that makes, makes DNA assembly a challenge is that the human genome is actually in fact is not really like prose. In some ways it's more like poetry, or a song even, in that it has a lot of repeating elements. And so you can imagine, say you were trying to assemble Mary Had a Little Lamb from pieces. You'd have "Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb, Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow", okay. Well then, if you just had the phrase "little lamb", where are you going to put that in this song? You can put it here, you could put it here, you could put it here, you just don't know. And it's actually the single thing that makes the assembly difficult is coping with the repeats.

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