Histones can be displaced by chromatin remodeling complexes, thereby exposing underlying DNA sequences to polymerases ... that can be seen with a light microscope. Once a cell has divided, its ...

Some histones function as spools for the thread-like DNA to wrap around. Under the microscope in its extended form, chromatin looks like beads on a string. The beads are called nucleosomes.

The team thought it might be a good candidate for finding histones because the bacterium changes size throughout its lifecycle and thus would need to carefully time DNA compression and unwinding. As a ...

We've now zoomed in enough to see portions of the DNA strand. The DNA is wrapped around histones -- protein structures that are sometimes depicted as discs. Histones carry a slight positive charge ...