Promote the enhancer to enhance the promoter

Now maybe it’s my biased selection of papers, but the frequency of chromatin conformation and DNA dynamics studies seem to be ever increasing. This is definitely due to the fantastic techniques available to study them but also because chromatin is cool and understanding the regulation of gene expression and how chromatin structure and composition reflect […]

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Loop it like cohesin

Chromatin, the combination of DNA and protein that resides within our nuclei, takes on a variety of forms. These forms vary depending on the type of cell, the stage of a cell’s cycle and environmental conditions. Techniques to pinpoint regions of chromatin contacts within a nucleus have provided great insight into nuclear organisation and the […]

Time to re-write the textbooks? How DNA is really packed inside the nucleus.

2 meters doesn’t sound like much. However, this is the same length of DNA that is compacted inside the nucleus of each cell. Now, considering that nuclei have a diameter a fraction of a mm and nuclear proteins need to be included as well, this raises the important question, how does DNA fit? This apparent […]