While digitizing the human genome is one of the recent major scientific achievements, unraveling genome structure and, more importantly, structure–function relationships has been a major preoccupation for many scientific teams worldwide. Indeed, the understanding of structure from the DNA level to nucleosomes, chromatin fibers, genes, and chromosomes holds the key to interpreting many of the associated genome functions from DNA repair and duplication to gene transcription.
To celebrate the anniversary of Biophysical Journal's newest section Nucleic Acids and Genome Biophysics, we present this Special Issue devoted to Genome Biophysics.
The cover image for this issue conveys the excitement in the field, as many techniques are being developed and applied by both experimentalists and modelers to decipher aspects of the genome puzzle. Specifically, the cover image highlights the genome puzzle from multiple scales and viewpoints. The illustration, created by G. Bascom and T. Schlick, features images from the contributions by A. Onufriev and colleagues on partially assembled nucleosomes (left top puzzle piece), B. Zhang and P. Wolynes on chromosomal domains (right bottom puzzle piece), and G. Bascom and T. Schlick on looping networks in fibers and genes (central image and background fibers).
We hope BJ readers will enjoy the excellent contributions in this issue that reflect an exciting range of topics, as well as the breadth and depth of this fascinating subject.
- Tamar Schlick