Five designer chromosomes bring synthetic life a step closer
by Bob Holmes, New Scientist:
The goal of creating a complex organism with a genome designed and built from scratch in the laboratory has come a giant step closer.
The team that built the first synthetic yeast chromosome three years ago has now added five more chromosomes, totalling roughly a third of the yeast’s genome. It’s a dramatic scaling-up of our capabilities, and opens the door to large-scale genomic engineering.
The world has already seen one synthetic genome, that of the bacterium nicknamed Synthia. However, bacteria have much smaller and simpler genomes than higher organisms such as yeast and humans, known as eukaryotes. Synthesising a eukaryotic genome is thus a much more complex challenge.
In 2014, a team led by Jef Boeke, now at New York University Langone Medical Center in New York City, managed to construct a single yeast chromosome. They then replaced one of a living yeast cell’s natural chromosomes with it – the first time this had been done in a eukaryote.
Boeke’s team has since edited the entire yeast genome (see “Re-engineering yeast”, below), before farming out the synthesis of the 16 rewritten chromosomes to an international consortium of geneticists and yeast biologists.
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