Pack it In

There’s an incredible two metres of DNA packed into almost every cell of your body, each containing all 20,000 or so genes that are needed to make a human body and keep it functioning. Not only is it a significant biological packing problem to get all this DNA inside the nucleus (the structure inside cells where DNA is stored), but it also has to be organised and rearranged when genes are switched on or off. However, most techniques for studying DNA rely on using dead cells that have been treated with various chemicals and processes, which doesn’t necessarily give a realistic picture of what’s going on. Created using a new technique that enables researchers to simulate (top) and visualise (bottom) DNA in living cells, these images show various arrangements of DNA inside the nuclei of cells from a fruit fly embryo, providing intriguing insights into the inner workings of life.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

Writer

Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image adapted from work by Gaurav Bajpai and colleagues
• Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, May 2021