Whenever we describe the genome we talk about it in very two-dimensional terms, almost like a railway track. Peter Fraser’s laboratory at the Babraham Institute outside Cambridge has published some extraordinary work showing it’s probably nothing like this at all. He works on the genes that code for the proteins required to make haemoglobin, the pigment in red blood cells that carries oxygen all around the body. There are a number of different proteins needed to create the final pigment, and they lie on different chromosomes. Doctor Fraser has shown that in cells that produce large amounts of haemoglobin, these chromosome regions become floppy and loop out like tentacles sticking out of the body of an octopus. These floppy regions mingle together in a small area of the cell nucleus, waving about until they can find each other. By doing this, there is an increased chance that all the proteins needed to create the functional haemoglobin pigment will be expressed together at the same time2