Self-organization in the genome

摘要

One of the most important recent discoveries in the field of genome biology has been the demonstration that genomes are nonrandomly organized in the cell nucleus (1, 2). Examples now abound of chromosomes or genes localizing to a particular location in the nucleus or undergoing positional changes as they became activated or repressed. Much of what we know about how genomes are organized in space and time comes from observation of single genes and is based on cytological, often descriptive, studies. The Holy Grail in this field is to elucidate what the mechanisms are that determine where a gene or a chromosome localizes within the cell nucleus. In a recent issue of PNAS, using a combined cytological and computational approach, Rajapakse et al. (3) make the first step toward this goal, and their findings support the provocative idea that genomes are self-organizing entities.