Gonzolabs

Editor’s note: Readers were intrigued by the cover of this week’s issue of Science: a paper describing the 3-dimensional structure of the human genome. In this post, the lead author on the paper, Erez, finishes his story of the mission to create the Science cover. Read about the beginning of the odyssey in our previous post.

Monday. Jason Ku, origami ninja, wakes up, folds a brown piece of paper into a bowl of cereal and a yellow one into a glass of orange juice. Fortified, he finishes the fold. He rejoins Erik, who folds a black piece of paper into a high-end camera – complete with (foldable) tripod – and takes a picture.

The final product:

Total folding time: 4 hours.

Total time from initial meeting to final image: 36 hours.

Sheets of paper: 1.

Use the crease pattern to make one yourself!

CONTEST. Think your genome origami is better than this one? Send me a picture of this fold or another (erez strudel erez.com) and win the coveted title of GENOME ORIGAMI MASTER-SENSEI.

Aftermath: Did it work? Well, we got the cover – but for a 3D Peano curve that Leonid Mirny and I created and rendered using PyMol. We were like, totally surprised. In a good – but potentially life threatening – way.

So why have I not yet been slain with origami shuriken? Well, the origami genome project has made it to Popular Science and Technology Review. A reprieve, at least for now.

So everyone wins – and I live to fold another day.