TERF1 · Meander

One of the proteins that caps a chromosome's ends, binding the telomere's repeats so the cell never mistakes a natural end for a broken strand of DNA.

TERF1 is a core component of shelterin, the protein complex that wraps and protects the telomere, the repetitive cap at each end of a chromosome. It binds directly to the telomere's double-stranded TTAGGG repeats, coating the DNA and folding it into a shape the cell reads as an end rather than a break.

By sensing how much telomeric DNA is present, TERF1 also helps set a ceiling on telomere length, holding back the machinery that would extend it. A capped, correctly measured telomere lets a chromosome be copied and separated cleanly; an exposed one trips the alarms a cell reserves for damaged DNA.

TERF1 wraps and caps the chromosome's ends so the cell never reads them as breaks. I did the reverse, unwrapping its 1,176-base coding sequence from the double helix and tracing it as a single meandering line across the sheet.

Provenance

The coding sequence of TERF1, transcript ENST00000679115 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.