Structure of chromosomes revealed

It took several years to develop all the computational tools to make this happen, but the structures we can now reconstruct from this high-quality data are quite striking. More importantly, this new approach is allowing us to study the variation in chromosome structure on a cell-by-cell basis. Tim Stevens Scientists have developed a novel approach to determine the 3D structures of chromosomes in single cells, using hundreds of measurements of where different parts of the DNA get close to one another. The research, by scientists at the Department of Biochemistry at Cambridge, working with colleagues at the Babraham Institute and the Weizmann Institute in Israel, was published in the journal Nature . The commonly illustrated "X" shape chromosome structure is only present when the cell divides. The researchers have now also been able to model the structure of chromosomes when they are active. This is extremely important because the way that DNA folds up in chromosome structures is intimately linked to the way that DNA is used.