How dividing cells avoid setting off false virus alarms

One feature of cell division has long puzzled scientists. The nucleus briefly disappears, leaving the cell's DNA exposed. Normally, bare DNA indicates a viral infection and triggers enzymatic alarms that alert the immune ...

Unraveling gene expression

The DNA of a single cell is two to three meters long end-to-end. To fit in the nucleus and function correctly, DNA is packaged around specialized proteins. These DNA-protein complexes are called nucleosomes, and they are ...

A new mechanism for accessing damaged DNA

UV light damages the DNA of skin cells, which can lead to skin cancer. But this process is counteracted by DNA repair machinery, acting as a molecular sunscreen. It has been unclear, however, how repair proteins work on DNA ...

How DNA is read and copied

Two scientists at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have unraveled aspects of how DNA organizes and preserves genetic information. Newly published research by Cynthia Wolberger, Ph.D., and James Berger, Ph.D., ...

Bending DNA costs less energy than assumed

The way DNA folds largely determines which genes are read out. John van Noort and his group have quantified how easily rolled-up DNA parts stack. This costs less energy than previously assumed. Publication in Biophysical ...

Genome-wide rules of nucleosome phasing in drosophila

LMU researchers have, for the first time, systematically determined the positioning of the packing units of the fruit fly genome and discovered a new protein that defines their relationship to the DNA sequence.

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