Mus musculus (House Mouse)

Gene density across the nineteen chromosomes of the house mouse.

Every organism arranges its genes across chromosomes, and the distribution varies between species. I drew gene density, the number of protein-coding genes in each region of each chromosome, for the house mouse across its nineteen autosomes.

The mouse is the unruly one of the three organisms in this series, its genes clustered tightly in some regions and spread sparsely across vast stretches of others; that unevenness is why I chose it. It hangs alongside an oak and a lichen-forming fungus in a three-piece series comparing how life arranges its genes.

Provenance

GENCODE Release vM38, Mus musculus (GRCm39 assembly)
https://www.gencodegenes.org/mouse/release_M38.html
GENCODE Consortium (EMBL-EBI, UCSC, Wellcome Sanger Institute, MIT, CRG). GRCm39 reference assembly 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

We are Genetics of Design, a data art studio that uses pen plotting as its medium. Every piece we make begins with a public record, whether road networks, genomes, star catalogs, or species data, which we translate through custom code into composition, density, and line, and publish alongside the provenance of the data it came from.