Interviewee: Jim Kent. Jim Kent, the author of the assembly program for the public sequence, talks about the difficulties of reassembling small pieces of the genome when there are so many repeat sequences.

The problem of genome assembly is basically that we can only read small bits of the genome, and the way we do it is we'll typically just read a random small bit. And so, to see the whole thing, we've got to stitch it together from these random little reads. And in principle this wouldn't be too hard except for the fact that the genome is not really like a book, it's not like prose, it's more like poetry. It has a lot of repeating elements. And when you get in a repeating elements you can actually get a bit lost when you're trying to stitch it together.

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