On this week's show: Building
yeast chromosomes from scratch and a roundup from the daily news site
In March undergraduate students in Johns Hopkins University's Build a Genome course announced they had made
a yeast chromosome from scratch — and history, too.
Not exact matches
However, to be truly useful, one must be able to transplant the bacterial
chromosome from yeast back into a recipient bacterial cell.
The synthetic
chromosome is based on
chromosome III
from the
yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, but it is not an exact replica.
Assistant Professor Kristin Baetz, who studies
chromosome stability using
yeast cells as a model, works with colleagues
from different organizations, universities, programs, and disciplines.
«The duplication of a single
chromosome is enough to change the
yeast from a relatively smooth colony to one with what we describe as a «fluffy» morphology.»
An international effort to build a carefully edited version of the
yeast genome
from scratch has reached a milestone by completing five more of 16
chromosomes
Szostak knew that non-chromosomal linear DNAs in
yeast normally insert themselves into
chromosomes or are destroyed by cellular enzymes, presumably because they behave as if they result
from random fractures.