DECRYPTION – Researchers have succeeded, using magnets, in manipulating these structures that carry our genes.
What are the physical properties of DNA when it is in the nucleus of our cells? Scientists have been wondering about this for years, but because they couldn’t take measurements directly in the nucleus, everyone seemed to have their own idea on the question, a kind of mental representation built from a mixture of observations and theoretical knowledge. In an article published Thursday in Science , a team led by researchers from the Institut Curie, in partnership with theoreticians from MIT, in Boston, reports for the first time a physical measurement made directly inside the nucleus. And the answer, quite surprisingly, is that chromosomes are very fluid.
“Before carrying out these experiments, I realized that most of the people involved in the project had quite different intuitions of what the measurements could give, which made them in themselves already very interesting”says Antoine Coulon, CNRS researcher and head of…
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