What's true of the best architecture is also true of cellular structures: form follows function. We biologists often take this mantra to an extreme, searching for the function of a molecule or gene without much consideration of its structure, its physical location, or its movement within the cell.
One of the things that attracted me to the field of nuclear organization was the need to understand not only how structural proteins interact with DNA, but also where they bind and why. I wasn't interested in single-gene regulation, but the form that the entire genome takes—not only in metaphase, when chromosomes assume their characteristic X shape, but also during interphase, when the business of cellular function gets done. Over the last 10 years, we turned to quantitative imaging of GFP-tagged chromosomes, genes, and proteins in living cells. By probing the organization and dynamics of the genome within the nucleus, we have ...
