Saccharomyces cerevisiaeFLICKR, RISING DAMPEighteen years after scientists sequenced the full genome of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, an international team of researchers has synthesized one of its sixteen chromosomes from scratch—the first time anyone has completed this feat for a eukaryote.
The team heavily edited its synthetic chromosome, altering around one-sixth of its base pairs with additions, deletions, and replacements. Despite these changes, yeast cells that carried the designer chromosome—known as SynIII—were indistinguishable from those with the normal version.
The team also built in the ability to edit SynIII even further. “Down the road, this will allow us to generate millions of variant daughter genomes, and screen them for interesting properties,” said Jef Boeke from New York University Langone Medical Center, one of the project’s leaders.
This discovery, described today (March 27) in Science, “is a landmark in synthetic biology,” said Tom Ellis from Imperial College London, who was not involved in the study. “It shows what you can change and get away with. It also ...
