FLICKR, AJ CANNSynthetic biologists often work with circular chromosomes to engineer genetic material because they’re stable and easy to manipulate, but they don’t resemble the natural shape of chromosomes in eukaryotes. Reporting in PNAS this week (November 5), Jef Boeke of NYU Langone Medical Center and postdoc Leslie Mitchell designed a tool, which they dubbed the telomerator, that straightens circular yeast chromosomes and adds telomeres to either end.
“To convert circular DNA to something more akin to a natural chromosome is appealing,” said Timothy Lu, a synthetic biologist at MIT who was not involved in the study. Lu said the telomerator could help advance a number of goals, from designing artificial chromosomes that encode complex pathways to testing the significance of telomere location in the genome. “It’s really a platform technology for downstream applications.”
The telomerator includes an endonuclease target—the site where the DNA loop will be severed—flanked by telomere seed sequences that form the basis of telomere construction. The telomerator is inserted into a gene of interest in the circular chromosomes, and when an endonuclease cuts the sequence at the recognition site, each exposed end carries a seed sequence on which to ...
