Construction of a yeast chromosome

摘要

A biological cell is much like a computer -the genome can be thought of as the software that encodes the cell's instructions, and the cellular machinery as the hardware that interprets and runs the software. Advances in DNA technology have made it possible for scientists to act as biological 'software engineers', programming new biological operating systems' into cells. Indeed, in 2010, the entire genome of the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides was replaced with a rewritten synthetic genome, generating the first synthetic cell. Now, in a paper published in Science, Annaluru et al. describe how they have begun rewriting the genome of a more complex organism, that of the yeast species Saccharomyces cerevisiae.