Understanding how DNA is folded, wound up, and packaged inside nuclei provides an additional layer of biological information to what’s written in the base pairs sequences. F1000 Faculty Member and National Cancer Institute cell biologist, Tom Misteli, discusses a paper that presents a high-resolution map of the yeast genome and illustrates the importance of building such maps (Nature, 465:363-67, 2010).
The Scientist: Now that the genomes of hundreds of species, including yeast and humans, have been sequenced, why is it important to be able to visualize the three-dimensional shape DNA takes in cells?
Tom Misteli: It’s a fundamental property of the genome to be organized, to be folded in some way inside the nucleus. Now it’s becoming clear that there is more to the genome than the sequence. We have to describe how the genome is organized, figure out the mechanisms involved ...
