Each month, when the new issue of Nature Genetics becomes available, we are often asked: What’s going on here?

So, starting with the October issue (a bit late, but better than never!) we will answer this burning question here on the blog.

This month’s cover image was submitted by the authors of the article on page 1158 of the issue: “Absence of canonical marks of active chromatin in developmentally regulated genes.”

The artwork was inspired by this painting by Salvador Dalí “Butterfly Landscape (The Great Masturbator in a Surrealist Landscape with D.N.A.)”. The authors provided the following description:

Two DNA regions in the style of Salvador Dalí, with butterflies representing activating histone marks. The DNA axis represents a developmental time course with the DNA fragment to the right constantly expressing branches (RNA) paralleled by decoration with active histone marks (butterflies). The DNA fragment to the left expresses RNA at one specific time point and is not decorated by active histone marks (even at that time point).

For a more information about the paper, see our recent blog post featuring Q&A with the authors.

The artwork on the cover is by Luisa Lente. This artist has worked with the authors before to produce journal cover images, including one for Genome Research and one for Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.