Today, researchers know that nucleosomes are structured as follows: Two each of the histones H2A, H2B, H3, and H4 come together to form a histone octamer, which binds and wraps about 1.7 turns of DNA, or about 146 base pairs. The addition of one H1 protein wraps another 20 base pairs, resulting in two full turns around the octamer. Obviously, 166 base pairs are not very much, as each chromosome contains over 100 million base pairs of DNA on average. Therefore, every chromosome contains hundreds of thousands of nucleosomes, and these nucleosomes are joined by the DNA that runs between them (an average of about 20 base pairs). This joining DNA is referred to as linker DNA. Each chromosome is thus a long chain of nucleosomes, which gives the appearance of a string of beads when viewed using an electron microscope