The euchromatic regions contained more genes and were simpler to sequence. Scientists had good reasons for initially deprioritizing heterochromatin. Left untouched, however, was a labyrinth of tightly wound, repetitive heterochromatin - a smaller portion of the genome, which does not produce protein. The Human Genome Project essentially handed us the keys to euchromatin, the majority of the human genome, which is rich in genes, loosely packaged, and busy making RNA that will later be translated into protein. "But from that missing eight percent, we're now gaining an entirely new understanding of how cells divide, allowing us to study a number of diseases we had not been able to get at before." Jarvis, a coauthor on the study who helped develop a number of techniques central to unlocking the final pieces of the human genome. "You would think that, with 92 percent of the genome completed long ago, another eight percent wouldn't contribute much," says Rockefeller's Erich D. Within the new data are mysterious pockets of noncoding DNA that do not make protein, but still play crucial roles in many cellular functions and may lie at the heart of conditions in which cell division runs amok, such as cancer. These long -missing pieces of our genome contain more than mere junk. Now, a large international team led by Adam Phillippy at National Institutes of Health has revealed the final eight percent of the human genome in a paper published in Science.
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