Inside a living cell, DNA keeps dancing at the same steady tempo

Your DNA is constantly on the move — tiny local jiggling that helps the cell read, copy and repair its own instruction book. A Japanese team led by Yu Nagata and Kazuhiro Maeshima has now measured that motion across the busiest stretch of a cell's life, when DNA is being duplicated and the nucleus is growing — and found, to their surprise, that the tempo barely changes. The steadiness seems to give everyday genome jobs a stable stage, while stress or damage can quicken the dance when the cell needs emergency repairs. The study is published in the Journal of Cell Science.

SDG 9 · Industry, innovation and infrastructure — Mechanism: tech innovation