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Dr. Jian Carrot-Zhang, PhD, is an Assistant Member in the Computational Oncology Service at MSK. Her research focuses on elucidating germline–somatic interactions across multi-ancestral populations.
Our chromosomes are much longer than the space in which they are packaged in the cell. Chromosome compaction is on the order of several thousand fold, yet these chromosomes have to be unraveled every cell cycle to be replicated accurately and the daughter chromosomes must be topologically unlinked to allow their separation and segregation into the daughter cells. Management of chromosome shape and topology in bacteria falls to three groups of proteins: the DNA topoisomerases, the structural maintenance of chromosome proteins (SMC), and the small double-strand DNA-binding nucleoid-associated proteins.