I am so sad to hear this. I remember my scientific discussions with Zara and her relentless drive. She will leave a memorable imprint on all of us who the chance to cross path with her, even briefly.

That was >40 years ago!

So many of John's papers still read incredibly prescient to this day.

Fun fact, John is still around and scheduled to give his faculty talk to my department this Wednesday.

As early as 1984 they reported pairwise distances between loci across they could recognize thanks their cytological patterns.

They were already using distance heatmaps, looking at contact between heterochromatin & the periphery and making polymers models, all with data from single live cells (!)

Not sure that's what you want but group of John Sedat was mapping polytene chromosome folding in the mid-80s.

www.nature.com/articles/308...
rupress.org/jcb/article/...