In Most Ambitious DNA Building Project Ever, Scientists Make An Artificial Yeast Chromosome
Cartoon of a Budding Yeast Maki Naro Humans have been engineering yeast "for thousands of years," says Jef Boeke, a Johns Hopkins researcher who is one of the world's top yeast biology experts. At first, I thought he was exaggerating. Yeast has been ubiquitous in science labs for decades now, studied in every possible way, like a microscopic lab rat, and I thought Boeke was referring to that. But he was referring to a more basic sort of manipulation: humans have been growing yeast for their own ends since they figured out how to brew beer and bake bread. "So we have this ancient industrial relationship with this organism," he says. Now he has taken the relationship to a whole new level. Boeke recently led a team of biologists in designing and building, from scratch, one chromosome of brewer's yeast's...