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Scientists have synthesized first artificial yeast chromosome
Technology Review reports that scientists have synthesized an entire yeast chromosome, the first artificial chromosome for the kingdom of life that includes humans, plants, and fungi. Yeast with the artificial chromosome appeared to be just as happy as their “natural” counterparts, reports the team. The methods developed to create the designer genomic structure could help synthetic biologists better use the single-celled fungi as biological factories for chemicals like biofuels and drugs.
Six years ago, the J. Craig Venter Institute built the first artificial chromosome, which encompassed the complete genome of a bacterium.
Two years later, that 582,970 base pair manmade genome was transplanted into a cell which successfully began to carry out its instructions.
The first synthetic yeast chromosome, reported in Science on Thursday, represents just part of that organism’s complete genome and is 272,871 base pairs long. The Johns Hopkins University-led team first designed the chromosome on a computer, streamlining the natural chromosome sequence so that it had less repetitive sequences and other tweaks. Undergraduate students in a class called “Build-A-Genome” at Johns Hopkins used molecular biology tricks to string together snippets of DNA around 70 nucleotides (A’s, T’s, G’s and C’s) long into 750-base pair blocks. Then, other researchers continued to assemble those blocks into longer stretches of the chromosome, and eventually the largest chunks were delivered into yeast cells, which took over the last assembly steps to create the whole, artificial chromosome
Journal Science – Total Synthesis of a Functional Designer Eukaryotic Chromosome
Source: http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/03/scientists-have-synthesized-first.html
