RECQL · Meander

A helicase that pries the double helix apart to keep DNA copying on track, one of the small family of enzymes whose failure lets the whole genome grow unstable.

RECQL is a DNA helicase, a molecular motor that unwinds the two strands of the double helix. It belongs to the RecQ family, a small set of enzymes that keep the genome from unravelling as it is copied and repaired, and it is the most abundant of them in human cells.

Its work is quiet maintenance: opening tangled or stalled DNA so a stuck replication fork can restart, and undoing the wrong kinds of recombination before they scramble a chromosome. When RecQ helicases fail, rearrangements accumulate and the genome grows unstable, the same breakdown that in its sibling proteins drives premature aging and cancer.

RECQL spends its life unwinding the double helix to keep the genome repairable; I unwound it in turn, tracing its 1,950-base coding sequence as a single meandering line across the sheet. It is the restless plot of the series: the line turns constantly, and I had to slow the machine down to draw it faithfully.

Provenance

The coding sequence of RECQL, transcript ENST00000421138 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

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.