scientists find tiny loops in the genomes of dividing cells

 I read this article from MIT about a new discovery in how our DNA behaves during cell division, and it honestly surprised me. For a long time, scientists thought that when a cell goes into mitosis, the 3D structure of the genome basically falls apart and gets rebuilt later. But according to the MIT team, some tiny DNA loops, called microcompartments, don’t disappear at all. They actually become stronger.

These loops connect regulatory regions and genes, and they might help cells “remember” which genes should turn back on after division. What I found most interesting is that the researchers didn’t even expect to find these loops—they only showed up when they used a newer high-resolution mapping technique. It makes me wonder how much of cell biology we still haven’t actually seen yet.

This changes the way we think about mitosis. Instead of the genome resetting completely, some structure stays in place, which might explain how cells quickly restart gene activity once division ends. I feel like this could lead to some big updates in how textbooks explain chromosome organization.