But as with other organisms, a great deal of the genetic sequence set forth early in the 21st Century was incomplete due to technical limitations. Chief amongst these was difficulty in obtaining reliable sequence information on sequences repeated in many places in the genome, which interfered with reliable assembly of sequenced portions (termed contigs ) into longer (ideally, chromosomal-length) linear sequence assemblies (termed scaffolds). Improvements in sequencing technology now permit better sequence determinations for high GC and highly repetitive regions.
The existence of a prior reference genome (produced from a female boxer named Tasha), combined with these new sequencing tools, was used by an international team of researchers in a paper published in March of this year in the