What are the physical properties of DNA when it is in the nucleus of our cells? Scientists have wondered about this for years, but because they couldn’t measure it directly in the nucleus, everyone seemed to have their own take on the matter, a kind of mental representation built from a mix of observations and theoretical knowledge. In an article published on Thursday Science A team of researchers from the Curie Institute, in collaboration with theorists at MIT in Boston, reports for the first time a physical measurement made directly inside the nucleus. And the answer, surprisingly, is that chromosomes are very fluid.
“Before doing these experiments, I realized that most of the people involved in the project had very different intuitions about what the measurements could give, which in itself made them very interesting.”says Antoine Coulon, CNRS researcher and head of…
Source: Le Figaro
