Displaying items by tag: Synthetic Yeast 20

The Craig Venter Institute built a synthetic bacterial genome, and George Church, Farren Isaacs and colleagues have engineered the E. coli genome using an innovative platform called MAGE and genome synthesis methods. Now the focus is on the first eukaryote, the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. This organism has 16 linear chromosomes and a relatively compact (~14Mb total; ~12 Mb nonredundant) and well-understood genome. The synthetic yeast genome can be used to answer a wide variety of profound questions about fundamental properties of chromosomes, genome organization, gene content, function of RNA splicing, the extent to which small RNAs play a role in yeast biology, the distinction between prokaryotes and eukaryotes, and questions relating to genome structure and evolution. The availability of a fully synthetic genome will allow direct testing of evolutionary questions not otherwise approachable. The eventual “synthetic yeast” being designed and refined could eventually play an important practical role. Yeasts, and S. cerevisiae in particular, are preeminent organisms for industrial fermentations, with a wide variety of practical uses including ethanol production from agricultural products and by-products.