DNA origami: how do you fold a genome?
Originally published on the WIMM blog Inside each of the cells in your body is an entire instruction manual containing all the information required to build an entire human being. Yet it isn’t just the words in that manual that are important: you have to read the right chapters, and in the right order. To build one particular part of a human, sometimes the end of one paragraph will redirect you to a different part of the book – but how do cells get redirected to the right bit? Complicated interactions between different parts of the instruction manual (otherwise known as your DNA) underlie the fascinating complexity of the human body, but understanding when, where and how they occur remains a fundamental challenge in biological research. In this blog, Marieke Oudelaar, a DPhil student in Jim Hughes’ lab at the WIMM, describes a new tool developed in the Hughes lab that holds the promise to decipher this complex code. Our bodies are composed of trillions of cells. Each of th