Figure - PMC

Skip to main content

An official website of the United States government

Here's how you know

Here's how you know

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

View full-text article in PMC

. 2023 Mar 28;24:51. doi: 10.1186/s13059-023-02888-y

Search in PMC
Search in PubMed
View in NLM Catalog
Add to search

© The Author(s) 2023

Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

PMC Copyright notice

Fig. 1 — Ontogeny as a software program encoded in the genome and running in the epigenome. The developmental software program is encoded in the DNA sequence. As the program runs, numerous subroutines are called and operate in different spatial and temporal contexts. The epigenome, at the level of DNA methylation (shown), histone modifications, chromatin structure and noncoding RNAs (not shown), acts in cells as the software’s data area. Differences in space and time in the running of the developmental software program (represented by different colours in the code) are also embedded in the epigenome/data area that is read and written by the software and dictates when and which subroutines are run—e.g. different gene expression programs, transcription factors, signalling pathways and protein levels (not shown)—and ultimately determines cellular phenotypes