For the first time, yeast chromosomes were synthesized

On March 27, 2014, Nature and a number of British newspapers reported for the first time that scientists have successfully synthesized the chromosome of a complex organism, a yeast.

This is a significant achievement, a milestone in the field of synthetic biology and promises to create a revolution in medicine and biotechnology.

Previously geneticist Craig Venter took 15 years and spent $ 40 million to synthesize a genome of a parasitic bacterium. Bacteria are prokaryotes, the simplest type of cells. Higher yeasts , are eukaryotic organisms (from plants to humans) . Today a group of scientists, mostly graduate students, have redesigned and produced a complete yeast chromosome , full of normal functions.

Professor Jef Boeke, principal author of yeast chromosome synthesis.(Photo: cadenaser.com)

The team relied on the known group of yeasts (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) to connect fragments of synthetic DNA, thereby producing an artificial yeast of yeast. They expect within the next four years to create a complete group of yeast genes synthesized by 16 chromosomes.

The main author of this research is the world's leading geneticist Jef Boeke at the Langone Medical Center at New York University. He said: 'Our research helps synthesize biology from theory to practice. In the field of making artificial yeast, this is the biggest step so far achieved . This is the largest fluctuating chromosome made in history. But the really important breakthrough is that it can be incorporated into a living yeast cell. Our studies show that the yeast cells that carry the synthetic chromosome appear to be very normal . They seem exactly the same as all natural yeast cells, only now they have some function. new, can do what natural yeast cannot do. "

The making of this synthetic yeast chromosome takes a lot of effort, like climbing Mount Everest, because it requires connecting 273,871 components of DNA in an exact order and eliminating about 5,000 Excessive sequence (sequence).

Farren Isaacs, a cell biologist at Yale University, said: 'The first time to synthesize and design eukaryotic chromosomes is a milestone for everyone to be excited.'

The work describes the yeast chromosomal synthesis of Boeke and colleagues published in Nature.