Art made by bioprinting yeast—engineered to produce six pigments—onto an agar plate.NYU LANGONE MEDICAL CENTER/INSTITUTE FOR SYSTEMS GENETICS/BOEKE LAB, JASMINE TEMPLEA large consortium of researchers, spread across four countries, has synthesized about one-third (approximately 3.5 million base pairs) of the 12 million base pair genome of the budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The team’s work—which was led by Jef Boeke, a yeast geneticist at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, and includes analyses of the 3-D structures of several synthetic chromosomes—is outlined in a series of seven papers published today (March 9) in Science.
In 2010, a separate team created the first bacterial organism with a functional, 1 million base pair synthetic genome. This latest study “is a significant milestone towards creation of the first fully synthetic eukaryotic genome,” Daniel Gibson of Synthetic Genomics in La Jolla, California, who led the teams that created the first synthetic bacterial genome and the first synthetic cell, wrote in an email to The Scientist. Gibson penned an editorial accompanying the present study but was not involved in the work.
In 2014, Boeke and another group of researchers synthesized the first eukaryotic chromosome: a slightly pared-down version of S. cerevisiae chromosome III. Since then, Boeke’s group brought additional collaborators on board the Synthetic Yeast Genome Project team, to synthetize a designer 11.3 million ...
