A few years back, Erez Lieberman-Aiden got a sobering lesson in how difficult it still is to understand the code of life: His professor had spent six long months just trying to calculate the distance between two pieces of a genome. Lieberman-Aiden envisioned a quicker way, and one night in March 2008 he started sketching some ideas. When he woke up the next morning, he had a plan. Last October, while completing a joint Ph.D. in math and bioengineering at Harvard and MIT, he led a team that published a three-dimensional model of the human genome, a major advance in deciphering how DNA actually regulates the machinery of life.
What is special about your 3-D model?
One of the central mysteries of biology is why the genome is largely identical from cell to cell, even though cells do different things. We showed that regulation of these cells is associated with the three-dimensional remodeling of the genome, which turns genes on and off…