Discovery of nano ‘footballs’

Discovery of nano ‘footballs’

materialsworld:

Research from the University of York has unearthed a ‘simply breathtaking’ discovery.

The work states that genes are controlled by ‘nano footballs’ – structures that look like footballs but are in fact 10 million times smaller than the average ball.

Professor Mark Leake, Chair of Biological Physics at the University of York, and who led the project said, ‘Our ability to see inside living cells, one molecule at a time, is simply breathtaking.

‘We had no idea that we would discover that transcription factors operated in this clustered way. The textbooks all suggested that single molecules were used to switch genes on and off, not these crazy nano footballs that we observed.’

Leake and his colleagues – supported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the University of Gothenburg and Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden – placed glowing probes on transcription factors, which are chemicals inside cells that control whether a gene is switched on or off. From this, it was determined that the transcription factors operate as a cluster of approximately seven to ten molecules.

The discovery could improve understanding about how genes operate and potentially provide more information on health problems associated with genetic disorders.

‘We found out that the size of these nano footballs is a remarkably close match to the gaps between DNA when it is scrunched up inside a cell,’ Leake added. ‘As the DNA inside a nucleus is really squeezed in, you get little gaps between separate strands of DNA which are like the mesh in a fishing net. The size of this mesh is really close to the size of the nano footballs we see.’

This, continued Leake, means that a nano football ‘can roll along segments of DNA but then hop to another nearby segment’, so it can find the specific gene it controls more quickly.