Polymer physics, scaling and heterogeneity in the spatial organisation of chromosomes in the cell nucleus

We review some of the recent progresses made by the application of polymer physics to the understanding of the spatial organization of chromosomes in the cell nucleus. In particular, we focus on some scaling properties of the contact probability of pairs of sites, discovered by recent genome-wide experiments exploiting new technologies such as Hi-C methods. © 2013 The Royal Society of Chemistry.