ATM · Meander

The alarm a broken chromosome trips: a giant kinase that senses a double-strand break and halts the cell until the damage is repaired, or the cell is sacrificed.

ATM is the master sensor of the DNA-damage response. When both strands of the double helix are severed, the most dangerous kind of break, ATM switches on within seconds and begins tagging hundreds of targets at once, broadcasting the alarm across the cell.

That signal stops the cell cycle so repair can proceed, marshals the repair machinery to the break, and, when the damage is beyond fixing, orders the cell to destroy itself rather than divide with a broken genome. Inherit two faulty copies and the result is ataxia-telangiectasia, a disorder of progressive neurological decline, immune weakness, extreme sensitivity to radiation, and a raised risk of cancer.

ATM stands guard over the genome, halting the cell the instant a chromosome breaks; here the sentinel is unwound in turn, its own 9,171-base coding sequence, the longest in the series, traced off the double helix as a single meandering line across the sheet.

Provenance

The coding sequence of ATM, transcript ENST00000601453 on the GRCh38 assembly, retrieved from Ensembl (EMBL-EBI).

Materials

Archival giclée print on fine-art paper, a faithful digital reproduction of a pen-plotted work. Each print ships with a signed data-provenance insert card.

Included

• One archival giclée print (unframed)
• Signed data-provenance insert card
• Care instructions

Studio

Genetics of Design is a data art studio that uses pen plotting as its medium. Each piece begins with a public record, whether road networks, genomes, star catalogs, or species data, translated through custom code into composition, density, and line, and published alongside the provenance of the data it came from.