… Across the wide range of technologies covered in this book there is one overriding message: shape, shape, shape. At every size,from atoms to cabledomes, we see that shapes can do things we could hardly have expected.
That’s a re-quote from the end of my post of a few days ago. It’s from the book, The Gecko’s Foot: Bio-inspiration: Engineering New Materials from Nature by Peter Forbes (2005).
The bits, below, carry Forbes’s theme into the genome. They’re from To Understand the Blueprint of Life, Crumple It, by Brandon Keim (Apr 28, 2009) in Wired Science:
… Unlike the textbook image of neatly-arranged, X-shaped lines of genes, which are usually photographed during moments of cellular stability, chromosomes assume a highly complicated form as genetic code is transcribed into a buzzing protein swarm. They’re intertwined like balls of loose twine.
In the last few years, scientists noticed that certain genes only seem to be activated when arranged in a certain configuration. Though unable to explain exactly why this happens, they’re convinced that understanding chromosomal topography is absolutely essential to understanding the genome.
… Exactly how chromosomes take their necessary shapes, and how these shapes then affect genes, is still unknown. Misteli called that knowledge the “holy grail.” Researchers do, however, have a few ideas. Some suspect that, rather than sending gene-activating and gene-stifling proteins to particular gene targets, chromosomes adjust their shape in order to bring genes closer to the proteins.
Misteli and Kosak describe this as a form of genomic self-organization, and say the findings support it. When Kosak and Rajapakse compared the mathematical patterns derived from their observations to patterns produced by a self-organizing computational model of the genome, the datasets fit.
Kosak next plans to study chromosome topography in human stem cells as they become functional tissue.
Read the full article to get all the details. [ link ]
-Julie
