Take the 2-minute tour ×  My teachers growing up told me it was
impossible to decode the maize genome. But yet its been done.
Why was decoding the genome so significant, and what made it so
difficult?  share|improve this question If I remember correctly
: it's huge and has lots of repetitive regions. It's very hard
to accurately sequence repeats de novo with high fidelity. – 
Thomas Ingalls Dec 24 '11 at 6:47  2 Answers 2  up vote 19 down
vote accepted  The short answer is that corn genome is large and
has a huge amount of duplication events. Around 80% of the
genome are repeated. It's hard to assemble genomes with large
amount of duplications because our sequencing technology,
practically, at best can give ~500 base pairs. Figuring out the
ordering of duplicated regions relies on scaffold sequences or
comparative assembly to rice genome.  share|improve this answer
Why was decoding the genome so significant? Because decoding the
genome gives us a complete picture of the genetic makeup of an
organism.  What