Two ways to read a genome: Body-wide, single-cell atlas maps DNA folding and methylation together

MedicalXpress | Jul 23, 2026

Every cell in the human body carries the same 3 billion letters of DNA, yet a neuron, a heart muscle cell and a pancreatic beta cell each use that shared code to do entirely different jobs. How cells pull off this trick comes down to epigenetics—chemical tags and three-dimensional structures that govern which genes are active and which stay silent.