Science and Weather‘Built from scratch’ chromosome takes us one step closer to synthetic life
Creating fully-artificial life forms, plants, animals and even microorganisms, 'from scratch' has largely been something left to the pages of science fiction, but an international team of scientists has taken us one step closer to pulling that idea off the page and putting it into real, practical use.
The team, led by New York University geneticist Jef Boeke, is reporting that they've made the first fully functional 'designer' chromosome — the snippets of DNA that carry genetic information — from the DNA of common brewers yeast. Although previous studies have produced synthetic versions of virus DNA and bacterial chromosomes, this is the first time that scientists have done so for a eukaryotic organism (plants, animals and fungi).
Dr. Boeke talks about the study in this video:
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This 'scrambling' technique that Dr. Boeke describes basically treats the chromosome as a deck of cards, with each gene in the chromosome being like an individual card.
"We can pull together any group of cards, shuffle the order and make millions and millions of different decks, all in one small tube of yeast," Dr. Boeke said in an NYU news release. "Now that we can shuffle the genomic deck, it will allow us to ask, can we make a deck of cards with a better hand for making yeast survive under any of a multitude of conditions, such as tolerating higher alcohol levels."
Not only that, but this kind of shuffling technique could lead to other advances in genetics and biology, to produce medications and vaccines and even better biofuels.
This global synthetic yeast genome project, called Sc2.0, involves researchers and undergraduate students from nearly a dozen different institutions in five different nations around the world, and their research is detailed on their website, syntheticyeast.org.
(Image courtesy: syntheticyeast.org)
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