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The New Math of How Cells Read Their Own DNA

quantamagazine.org Natalie Wolchover 9 min

The New Math of How Cells Read Their Own DNA

For decades biologists pictured the genome as a script read straight through. Imaging tells a looser story: cells decide which genes to transcribe on the fly — not a continuous scan but gated bursts.

Those windows cluster when the cell is ready, then go quiet again — a rhythm the old continuous-scan picture never predicted. Live recordings from single nuclei show polymerase arriving in short pulses, then vanishing before the next wave begins.

Ac
Note

Pull the burst-timing dataset for the intro.

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