Since the initial release of the human genome over a decade ago, researchers have extensively studied areas, accounting for roughly 8 percent of the genome, where data remains missing. These ‘blackout zones’ span millions of bases on each chromosome. To demonstrate this to scale, if Earth’s surface is 196.9 million square miles, we are talking about a group of blackout zones in the human genome that are collectively larger than Africa by 4 million square miles, or four times the size of the United States.
What are these mysterious blackout zones? And why are these regions absent from our map of the human genome?
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Read the full, original story: Our first view into the ‘blackout zones’ of the human genome
