WE STORE our most important genes in the centre of the nuclei of our cells, a geneticist told the BA meeting in Glasgow last week. This discovery that our nuclei have an internal architecture may explain why cloning and gene therapy so often fail. It could also force scientists to rethink the way they look at the human genome, she says.
“Our genes are not uniformly distributed,” says Wendy Bickmore of the Medical Research Council’s Human Genetics Unit in Edinburgh. “They are clustered together. We have a very active compartment in the centre of the cell nucleus, and a much more silent, passive compartment around the edges.”