This is a mesmerizing beauty inside each and every living being's body... this is hard read if one doesn't know basics on genetics (which everyone should) but it's funny to watch how top scientists struggle with the limitations of our language and come up with analogies to make it comprehensible.
The video, reported last year, is fuzzy and a few seconds long, but it wowed the scientists who saw it. For the first time, they were witnessing details of an early step — long unseen, just cleverly inferred — in a central event in biology: the act of turning on a gene. Those blue and green blobs were two key bits of DNA called an enhancer and a promoter (labeled to fluoresce). When they touched, a gene powered up, as revealed by bursts of red.
The event is all-important. All the cells in our body contain by and large the same set of around 20,000 distinct genes, encoded in several billion building blocks (nucleotides) that string together in long strands of DNA. By awakening subsets of genes in different combinations and at different times, cells take on specialized identities and build startlingly different tissues: heart, kidney, bone, brain. Yet until recently, researchers had no way of directly seeing just what happens during gene activation.
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A lesson from this? “Beyond the biochemistry, there are all these physical phenomena that may have a role in telling us how genes get turned on,” says biophysicist Ibrahim Cissé of MIT, who led the work.
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