How often do you think about yeast? Maybe we have some bakers in the audience, but otherwise, we bet you don’t often linger on the little fungus. But you should. Yeast is the Swiss Army Knife of fungi. It makes our drugs, improves our chocolate, and allows us to make beer even when it’s 45 million years old. And now, it might help us create synthetic lifeforms.
In a suite of papers revealed today, the Synthetic Yeast Project has unveiled that it’s replicated five more chromosomes from yeast, out of a total of sixteen. To be clear, we’re not talking about roboyeast, here. Instead, we’re talking about yeast that has its chromosomes engineered in a lab and combined to make the platonic ideal of yeast or, at least, a yeast we’d prefer to have around. That we’re creating chromosomes, let alone ones that largely work, is a huge deal not just for building yeast, but for creating synthetic genomes of other organisms. Scientists have focused on yeast because, basically, it’s an achievable goal that lets them work out the kinks in the technology. It’s expected we’ll have a full synthetic yeast genome within two to three years.
That said, we can’t “print out” a fungus just yet: If you think of the organism like an IKEA bookcase, the chromosomes are like the little instruction booklet. You still need a lot of other parts before we’re creating synthetic yeast, let alone other organisms, in the lab. Nonetheless, though, this is a major breakthrough in a number of ways, and it’s a huge step forward for genetic engineering.
(Via Gizmodo)