The following is an edited excerpt.
When scientists first decided to sequence the human genome, it seemed an impossibly large and complicated challenge. A decade since achieving this aim, scientists are faced with a similarly overwhelming challenge: understanding the folding of a human’s entire genetic data into a tiny cell nucleus.
In a study published in Nature Genetics, I, along with and John Mattick from Sydney’s Garvan Institute of Medical Research and John Stamatoyannopoulos from Seattle’s University of Washington, show the folding of the genome influences not only which genes are transcribed, but also the internal wiring of the genes themselves.
Read the full story here: Kinky genes: how we fit three metres of DNA into a cell nucleus
Additional Resource:
- Folding@home
The mechanisms of protein folding are so complex that researcher at Stanford started a distributed computing project to use spare processing power to tackle the problem.
