Synthetic biology: A yeast for all reasons

This article reports on work done by Dymond et al. to reengineer the genetic sequence of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a baker’s yeast.  Previous work in the area of synthetic biology included the genetic reengineering of bacteria such as Escherichia coli and Mycoplasm.  In S. cerevisiae, Dymond and his team have been able to replace sections of two chromosomes with synthetic DNA: twenty regions from the naturally occurring yeast chromosome were removed and genes with bases longer than 500 were recoded to contain “watermarks”, sequences that are used for the easy differentiation between synthetic DNA and natural sequences.  The findings for this experiment indicate that synthetic DNA can be used with minimal risks: yeast cells did not suffer serious defects and the synthetic sequence was reproduced in living cells.  In addition to this, Dymond and his team introduced loxPsym sites into their synthetic DNA.  They found that, in the presence of an enzyme called Cre recombinase, loxPsym sites combine with each other to make new random structures.  These findings indicate that there is great potential to synthesize numerous yeast genomes with differing structures. The major setback to this research is that a lot amount of time, money, and labor is needed to continue it.  I think the work Dymond and his team are doing is very important to genetics and biology.  Using synthetic DNA to recode the genomes of different bacteria will accelerate experiments involving these organisms: their genome will be easier to understand and work with if it is recoded to be simpler.