New CPGE Research Published in Biophysical Journal

Chromatin domains, boundaries, and contact enrichments are often interpreted as fixed structural entities, even though most experimental measurements are averaged over large and heterogeneous cell populations. A new modeling framework developed at Northwestern’s Center for Physical Genomics and Engineering, SR-EV, and published this month in Biophysical Journal shows that many of these features can be understood as emerging from minimal geometric rules combined with ensemble-level bias, without requiring explicit molecular interactions or deterministic folding mechanisms. By distinguishing single-configuration heterogeneity from ensemble-level statistical organization – including the emergence of chromatin packing domains– SR-EV supports an interpretation in which chromatin organization is realized in individual cells but must be analyzed through ensembles. This perspective clarifies the probabilistic nature of genome architecture and provides a tractable reference framework for interpreting multimodal genomic and imaging data. Read the paper here