Structural Organization and Properties of DNA in the Cell
Abstract Book of the XXIII IUPAP International Conference on Statistical Physics, Genova, Italy, (9-13 July 2007)Abstract
The dynamical architecture of the cell nucleus can be regarded as one of the grand challenges of structural biophysics.
The genomic DNA and the histone proteins compacting it
into chromatin account for the major part of the contents of the
nucleus. We will discuss the structural properties of the
DNA. We present a model for the chain that can successfully describe
experimentally measured distance distributions on chromosome 1 and 11
in human cells using the notion of ridge regions (cluster of
strongly expressed genes) and the antiridge regions.