Jonathan Widom Dies

Jonathan Widom, a biochemist at Northwestern University has died, reports Nature. He was 55. Widom's research focused on nucleosomes, studying where nucleosomes were located and how the packaged DNA. At Nature, Rob Philips notes that at the time of Widom's death, he and his colleagues had developed a "groundbreaking chemical-mapping strategy using engineered histones to investigate this question and produce maps at base-pair resolution." Widom also led the Physical Sciences-Oncology Center at Northwestern. "Jon was much more than an outstanding scientist," said colleague Kelly Mayo in a Northwestern obituary. "He was a warm and caring friend who gave freely of his time, advice and expertise and a dedicated mentor who always gave credit to his 'troops,' his laboratory trainees."