Interviewee: Ewan Birney. Ewan Birney, one of the leading analysts involved in the Human Genome Project, takes you on an informal tour of a chromosome. (DNAi Location: Genome>Tour>chromosome close-up>Video: An informal chromosome tour Part II)

And presumably in our bodies there are proteins that, that bind onto that part of the DNA and say right, this is a gene, we're in business at this area, and it gathers around a whole set of proteins and it maps that piece of DNA from DNA out into RNA. And it's a bit like taking the information off a hard disk on a computer and put it into memory, you know, making it a real program that's running. So that process of DNA to RNA is like making, is like running a program, you know, double-clicking on an icon. So you probably have a number of these regions going down the genome, and sometimes they're just one after the other after the other, and it's just straight, five, ten, fifteen genes all in a row. Quite why that is, we don't know. And then suddenly, you know, it's all chilled out and there's nothing going on, there's a sort of big gene that's just one gene in a region, and again we don't know really why everything compresses in some regions and then spaces out in other regions.

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