glorious genome

this is the:

"highest-resolution picture ever of the genome’s three-dimensional structure.

The picture is one of mind-blowing fractal glory, and the technique could help scientists investigate how the very shape of the genome, and not just its DNA content, affects human development and disease.

For decades, some cell biologists suspected that the genome’s compression wasn’t just an efficient storage mechanism, but linked to the very function and interaction of its genes.

In mathematical terms, the pieces of the genome are folded into something similar to a Hilbert curve, one of a family of shapes that can fill a two-dimensional space without ever overlapping — and then do the same trick in three dimensions. How evolution arrived at this solution to the challenge of genome storage is unknown. It might be an intrinsic property of chromatin, the DNA-and-protein mix from which chromosomes are made.

“How much variation is there in structure across cell types? What controls it? Exactly how important is it? We don’t know,” said Dekker. “This is a new area of science.”