Keep it Tight

As soon as one or two threads in a ball of string come loose, the whole structure can fall apart, leaving a tangled, impractical mess. Long strands of DNA in our cells are wrapped tightly around proteins in a combined structure called chromatin and, like the tangle in the back of your craft drawer, are problematic when they lose their shape. Disrupted chromatin is a hallmark of cancer, but until now how the structure changes has been unclear. A new approach to visualising the transformation has given researchers an unprecedented look at the process. A fluorescent dye binds to DNA, and the dense arrangement of healthy tight chromatin structure shines more brightly than unfurling sections. Clear differences were seen between healthy, precancerous (pictured) and cancerous cells. Tracking this change could help stratify the risk of patients, catching cancer early and guiding treatment.

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 Jianquan Xu and colleagues
• Biomedical Optical Imaging Laboratory, Departments of Medicine and Bioengineering, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
• Published in Science Advances, March 2022