Scientists from the Kavli Institute of Delft University of Technology and the IMP Vienna Biocenter have discovered a new property of the molecular motors that shape our chromosomes. While six years ...

At the scale of individual cells, the human body is constantly in motion. Every second, millions of cells divide, particularly in tissues such as the bone marrow, intestine and skin; neurons and heart ...

One of the most detailed 3D maps of how the human chromosomes are organized and folded within a cell's nucleus is published in Nature. Chromosomes are thread-like structures that carry a cell's ...

Not all DNA looks like the familiar double helix. Sometimes, parts of our genetic code fold into unusual shapes under certain conditions. One such structure known as a G-quadruplex (G4) looks like a ...

Embryonic stem (ES) cells are pluripotent stem cells that can produce all cell types of an organism. ES cells proliferate rapidly and have been thought to experience high levels of intrinsic ...

Every time a cell divides, it must copy roughly three billion letters of DNA with near-perfect fidelity. That copying process, DNA replication, is among the most demanding operations a cell performs, ...

The illustration shows DNA being folded into a loop by an SMC motor called cohesin (in purple/blue). The purple part of the motor (with a red/green label) is the protein subunit NIPBL, which acts as a ...

New work shows that physical folding of the genome to control genes located far away may have been a critical turning point for life on Earth. For evolutionary biologists, what most distinguishes the ...

Scientists from Delft, Vienna, and Lausanne discovered that the protein machines that shape our DNA can switch direction. Until now, researchers believed that these so-called SMC motors that make ...

Scientists have discovered a new property of the molecular motors that shape our chromosomes. While six years ago they found that these so-called SMC motor proteins make long loops in our DNA, they ...