Fig. 2

Conformations of the α globin locus can be grouped by similarity. A clustering analysis gives a dendrogram (left), which indicates how similar or different the conformations are. Conformations fall into four main representative structures depending on the pattern of contacts they exhibit (see Additional file 2: Supplementary Methods). Contact maps for each representative structure are shown (center; the region shown is indicated by the green line in Fig. 1 c), as is a schematic of each representative structure (right). The proportion of simulated conformations adopting a given structure gives a prediction of the frequency with which that structure will occur in a population of cells