corners of the human genome are on steroids with tandem repeats

An example of metaphor in public science discourse:

""The celebrated release of the finished genome back in 2003 was really focused on the portions that we could at the time map and assemble. But there were big persistent gaps. Roughly about two hundred million bases long that were missing. It was roughly eight percent of the genome was missing…

These regions are quite special, we think about tandem repeats or pieces of sequences that are found in a head-to-tail orientation in the genome, these are corners of our genome where this is just on steroids, where we see a tremendous amount of tandem repeats sometimes extending for ten millionmbases. They are just hard to sequence, and they are hard to put together correctly and that was – that was the wall that the original human genome project faced."

Dr Karen Miga

Dr Karen Miga (University of California, Santa Cruz) was being interviewed on an episode of 'Science in Action'. Read 'Genes on steroids? The high density of science communication'.