FLICKR, RISING DAMPNew York University Langone Medical Center’s Jef Boeke and colleagues presented SynIII, a synthetic Saccharomyces cerevisiae chromosome, in Science this week (March 27). While the team edited around one-sixth of the eukaryotic chromosome, S. cerevisiae cells containing the synthetic chromosome appeared no different from typical yeast.
Tom Ellis from Imperial College London, who was not involved in the study, called the work “a landmark in synthetic biology.”
“This is significant as an example of synthetic genomics [moving] beyond making copies of chromosomes to making significant functional changes,” Harvard University’s George Church told The Scientist in an e-mail.
NHGRIMembers of the Functional Annotation of the Mammalian Genome (FANTOM) project this week (March 26) presented atlases of human enhancers and promoters in Nature. “We made an encyclopedia of the definition of the normal cell: 185,000 promoters, 44,000 enhancers, and the majority of them are tissue-specific,” said Yoshihide Hayashizaki from the RIKEN Omics Science Center.
Scientists who were not involved in the research marveled at the effort. “This will be a very valuable resource for the community,” biochemist Wei Wang from the University of California, San Diego, told The Scientist. “This is a very broad survey of transcriptional activity in diverse cell types, [making it] a very valuable resource, and currently, quite unique,” added Zhiping Weng from the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
COURTESY OF J.T. VOGELSTEIN ET AL.Using an automated technique developed to study the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans and optogenetics, among other approaches, researchers from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Research Campus and at Johns Hopkins University have recorded and classified the behavioral effects of activating sets of neurons throughout the larval fruit-fly brain. Their work was published in Science this week (March 27).
This work “gives me some hope that we can actually understand the Drosophila brain,” Aravinthan Samuel, a neuroscientist and physicist at Harvard University, who ...
