Quercus robur (English Oak)

Gene density across the twelve chromosomes of the English oak.

I drew gene density, the number of protein-coding genes in each region of each chromosome, for the English oak across its twelve chromosomes. The oak shows mild clustering: genes gather in denser neighborhoods, an arrangement that sits between the lichen's evenness and the mouse's sprawl.

It is the middle temperament of a three-piece series I made comparing how three very different organisms, a mouse, an oak, and a lichen-forming fungus, arrange their genes.

Provenance

Ensembl Plants, Quercus robur (assembly dhQueRobu3.1, GCA_932294415.1)
https://plants.ensembl.org/Quercus_robur/Info/Index
Ensembl Plants (EMBL-EBI). Reference assembly dhQueRobu3.1 from the Wellcome Sanger Institute / Darwin Tree of Life Project.

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.