PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: <\/p>\n
11-Dec-2014 <\/p>\n
Contact: Glenna Picton picton@bcm.edu<\/a> 713-798-4710 Baylor College of Medicine @bcmhouston<\/p>\n EMBARGOED for release Thursday, Dec. 11, 2014, at 12 p.m. ET <\/p>\n HOUSTON - (Dec. 11, 2014) - The ancient Japanese art of origami is based on the idea that nearly any design - a crane, an insect, a samurai warrior - can be made by taking the same blank sheet of paper and folding it in different ways. <\/p>\n The human body faces a similar problem. The genome inside every cell of the body is identical, but the body needs each cell to be different -an immune cell fights off infection; a cone cell helps the eye detect light; the heart's myocytes must beat endlessly. <\/p>\n Appearing online this week in the journal Cell, researchers at Baylor College of Medicine, Rice University, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and Harvard University describe the results of a five-year effort to map, in unprecedented detail, how the 2-meter long human genome folds inside the nucleus of a cell. Their results show that the cell-- like a microscopic origamist - modulates its function by folding the genome into an almost limitless variety of shapes. <\/p>\n A centerpiece of the new study is the first reliable catalog of loops spanning the entire human genome. For decades, scientists have examined the regions in the close vicinity of a gene to understand how it is regulated. But as the genome folds, sequences far from a gene loop back and come in contact with those nearby elements. <\/p>\n Looping has been a blind spot for modern biology. \"For over a century, scientists have known that DNA forms loops inside of cells, and that knowing where the loops are is incredibly important,\" said co-first author Suhas Rao, a researcher at the Center for Genome Architecture at Baylor. \"But mapping the positions of all those loops was long thought to be an insurmountable challenge.\" <\/p>\n The researchers showed that the 3 billion DNA letters of the human genome are partitioned into roughly 10,000 loops, a surprisingly small number. (Prior work on loops had suggested that the genome contains over a million.) <\/p>\n <\/p>\n More:<\/p>\n Scientists map the human loop-ome, revealing a new form of genetic regulation<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 11-Dec-2014 Contact: Glenna Picton picton@bcm.edu<\/a> 713-798-4710 Baylor College of Medicine @bcmhouston EMBARGOED for release Thursday, Dec. Continue reading