“Figuring out how things work has always been my passion,” explains Karolin Luger, a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator and Monfort Professor at Colorado State University. Very likely this natural curiosity is one of the big factors in Luger’s formula for success. While a research assistant professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, ETH Zürich) she solved the structure of the nucleosome, a major breakthrough in the scientific community that is now cited in every modern textbook of molecular biology.
→ A Chromosome is a single large macromolecule of DNA. Only during
nuclear division do chromosomes have the typical X shape in which they
are most commonly portrayed. The two arms are called Chromatids, each
of which consists of two strands of DNA. Chromatids are joined at the
Centromere and consist of Chromatin, a complex of DNA and proteins that
makes up the chromosome.
What’s happening inside a cell can be compared to an old-fashioned music tape and a cassette player. The genetic information is stored in the DNA, much as music is encoded in a linear way on the magnetic tape. In order to listen to the music, it must be decoded back to sounds. A lot of music can be stored on one tape, and that one tape must be rather small to fit into the tape player; hence, the encoded music must somehow be compressed. This process of packing and unpacking is quite similar to what occurs in human DNA, which stores information on “how and what kind of human to build.” However, the nucleus, the place where the DNA is stored, is exceedingly small. Luger’s main area of research focuses on how the DNA is physically packaged in the cell’s nucleus, and how this packaging affects “which type of music you are listening at any given time,” as she explains.
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