Cats and Yarns:

The DNA strands are wrapped around histone protein cores like "yarn balls", which form nucleosomes. Some DNA regions (threads) are folded as “close chromatin” while loose threads are “open chromatin”. The previous techniques can only identify these epigenetics statuses at bulk level while our new method “MeSMLR-seq” makes the first sharp-eyed observation as cat: nucleosome positioning and chromatin openness at each single DNA molecules (threads and balls with different colors) can be seen. In addition, cat likes yarn balls.

Railway, Mountains, and Valleys:

Railway represents the double-stranded DNA molecules. Different railways stretching around mountains (i.e., nucleosomes) indicate different DNA molecules. The road lights represent the exogenous 5mC at GpC sites introduced by our MeSMLR-seq protocol, which label and show the linker DNA fragments between nucleosomes (mountains) and the open chromatin regions (town). The town with many road lights shows vigorous of human activities. i.e., the open chromatin regions are active for many biological processes. For example, the buildings/houses indicate transcription factors binding to open promotors for gene transcriptions. The dark mountain areas represent the regions occupied by nucleosomes, with less biological events.

Temples, Moutains and Clouds:

This is similar with “railway and mountain”, where cloud represents DNA molecules and pine tree represents the exogenous 5mC at GpC sites introduced by MeSMLR-seq. It could be in a style of Chinese painting.