Influence of chromatin molecular changes on RNA synthesis during embryonic development.

Two aspects of the chromatin repeat length (rl) are discussed: (i) Why is rl longer for slowly dividing cells than in rapidly dividing cells?, and (ii) Why is the temporal evolution of rl a decreasing function of time (t) in mammalian cortical neurons, whereas it is an increasing function of t for granule cells around the time of birth? These questions are discussed in terms of a hypothesis which assumes a correlation between deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) packaging, transcription, and replication.