A Genome is Not a Blueprint
Image: 1936 Joy Oil gas station blueprints (top); sequence from human chromosome 1 (bottom). Source: from A Monkey’s Blueprint by Martin Krzywinski on SA Visual When artist Martin Krzywinski was challenged to come up with a graphic that quickly and concisely shows how the human genome is more similar to chimpanzee and bonobo genomes than [...]
By Kalliopi Monoyios
This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
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Image: 1936 Joy Oil gas station blueprints (top); sequence from human chromosome 1 (bottom).
Source: from A Monkey’s Blueprint by Martin Krzywinski on SA Visual
When artist Martin Krzywinski was challenged to come up with a graphic that quickly and concisely shows how the human genome is more similar to chimpanzee and bonobo genomes than to the gorilla genome, he faced many hurdles – from combating the idea that a genome is a type of blueprint to the technical constraints of depicting the 3 million bases that comprise our genome. In A Monkey’s Blueprint, Krzywinski walks us through the process that eventually led to images that appeared in the September 2014 issue of Scientific American.
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