This artwork was created as a cover image for Nature Genetics for the Vaquerizas lab, for the paper 'Independence of chromatin conformation and gene regulation during Drosophila dorsoventral patterning' (Ing-Simmons et al, 2021). We wanted to create something that was distinctive but referenced enough field-specific imagery for the subject matter to obvious at a glance. We settled on a cross-section of at gastrulating drosophila embryo.
You can read the paper at www.nature.com/articles/s41588-021-00799-x
Cells in different parts of the embryo express different genes (colored highlights) and will form different tissues. However, chromosome conformation capture and imaging approaches show that the three-dimensional organization of the genome across these different tissues is the same.
