Well Packed

You probably wear the jeans that are in easy reach at the top of your overstuffed drawers more than those tucked at the back. Some genes, too, are easier to reach than others. Genetic material is tightly packed into a structure called chromatin, and which genes are expressed can depend on how this packing unfurls. Researchers hoping to understand how these structural changes guide the development of our lungs compared gene activity to packing structure in mouse lung starter cells (pictured) that produce a protein called Sox9 (red). They identified the proteins responsible for chromatin reshaping, and key signalling pathways vital to healthy lung development. Mice with a particular molecular pathway blocked failed to produce healthy lung linings and developed defective lungs. This knowledge could lead to explanations of how some developmental lung diseases take hold, and perhaps even reveal which existing treatments could be repurposed for other conditions.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Divya Khattar and Sharlene Fernandes, and colleagues
• Department of Pediatrics, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, August 2022