Human Genome as a 3D Structure

Absolutely fascinating look at the mathematical properties of the human genome:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/10/fractal-genome/

“There’s no knots. It’s totally unentangled. It’s like an incredibly dense noodle ball, but you can pull out some of the noodles and put them back in, without disturbing the structure at all,” said Harvard University computational biologist Erez Lieberman-Aiden, also a study co-author.

 

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.

Lieberman-Aiden likened the configuration to the compressed rows of mechanized bookshelves found in large libraries. “They’re like stacks, side-by-side and on top of each other, with no space between them. And when the genome wants to use a bunch of genes, it opens up the stack. But not only does it open the stack, it moves it to a new section of the library,” he said.