Mobile Genome

The genome's restless passengers: human-specific LINE-1 elements that copied themselves across the chromosomes over evolutionary time, each mapped as a radial spoke whose reach marks how recent, and how intact, the copy is.

LINE-1 is the genome's most successful mobile element: a "jumping gene" that copies itself and pastes the copy back into the chromosomes, again and again across evolutionary time. Its youngest, human-specific family, L1H, is still doing it. Most copies arrive broken, truncated from one end, so a copy's length records its history: short stubs are ancient, degraded relics, while the rare full-length elements near six thousand bases are recent insertions that arrived with their machinery intact.

Here the twenty-two autosomes are joined head to tail into a single closed ring, and every L1H element longer than five hundred bases is placed at its true position along it as one radial spoke, reaching outward in proportion to the element's length, so the young, intact copies flare out of the crowd while the old stubs stay close to the ring.

Nothing else is drawn. The composition is the data: dense pickets mark where the mobile DNA piled up, sparse arcs mark where it did not, and the whole reads as a single burst of restless genome activity radiating from the chromosome ring.

Provenance

Genome in a Bottle (GIAB) genome stratifications, L1H retrotransposons (GRCh38)
https://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/genome-bottle
Genome in a Bottle Consortium / National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Reference genome GRCh38 from the Genome Reference Consortium.

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.