Is the shape of a genome as important as its content?

If there is one thing that recent advances in genomics have revealed, it is that our genes are interrelated, "chattering" to each other across separate chromosomes and vast stretches of DNA. According to researchers at The Wistar Institute, many of these complex associations may be explained in part by the three-dimensional structure of the entire genome. A given cell's DNA spends most of its active lifetime in a tangled clump of chromosomes, which positions groups of related genes near to each other and exposes them to the cell's gene-controlling machinery. This structure, the researchers say, is not merely the shape of the genome, but also a key to how it works.

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