text: Work from the Widom laboratory has shown that nucleosomal DNA is in equilibrium between a wrapped and unwrapped state. Measurements of these rates using time-resolved FRET revealed that DNA within the nucleosome remains fully wrapped for only 250 ms before it is unwrapped for 10-50 ms and then rapidly rewrapped. This implies that DNA does not need to be actively dissociated from the nucleosome but that there is a significant fraction of time during which it is fully accessible. Indeed, this can be extended to the observation that introducing a DNA-binding sequence within the nucleosome increases the accessibility of adjacent regions of DNA when bound. This propensity for DNA within the nucleosome to "breathe" has important functional consequences for all DNA-binding proteins that operate in a chromatin environment. In particular, the dynamic breathing of nucleosomes plays an important role in restricting the advancement of RNA polymerase II during transcription elongation.