Even living cells have their own tangled problems to solve. They involve knots that arise accidentally in DNA and that can comprise its functionality. Researchers now suggest that the DNA propensity to be supercoiled, just like telephone cords, prevents accidental knots. These coils can keep DNA knots locked in place long enough to be untied by specialised enzymes. The computational study, based on molecular dynamics simulations of bacterial DNA, has just been published in Nucleic Acids Research.