| 3D images reveal new ways to pack |
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![]() Resembles a ball of uncooked noodles
How do wild insert two meters DNA in every cell in our bodies? The answer now comes from U.S. researchers who mapped the genome in 3D. The result resembles a ball of uncooked noodles.
How about a two-meter long wire with information in the form of three billion base pairs to be stowed into a cell nucleus, which is three microns in diameter. It is what nature succeeded in all cells that we have in our bodies. How it goes to the researchers the world over a long time trying to figure out.
At American Harvard, Massachusetts Medical School
and MIT seem now to have arrived at the answer. Through a new
technology, they have succeeded in producing a three dimensional
picture of how our genome stevedore to one another in the cell nucleus.
The result resembles a ball of uncooked noodles. But the pictures give
more than that, they show that genes that are active in a given cell
type is loosely packed in the vicinity of each other while they are
inactive, tightly packed, as in a warehouse shelf, in another part of
the ball.
- Nature shows off an amazingly elegant solution
to store information in the form of a super-T and knutfri structure,
"said Eric Lander, of MIT and Harvard, said in a statement.
According to the researchers packed genome 1000
billion times denser than the transistors in the world's most advanced
computer memory. But that's not all. Although the reading of
information takes place in a clever way by the genes to be read by
unfolds from the ball and then withdrawn when the job is done.
To obtain the three-dimensional structure, the
researchers broke up the genome into millions of small parts, which
were tagged and analyzed in parallel.
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