A yeast with a synthetic chromosome! What does this advance mean?

For years, a handful of brilliant minds have pursued a common goal: to create life. That objective is not to procreate, or to play God, but to design and generate simple forms of life, capable of reproducing and proliferating by themselves. The theory says that if these life forms can be designed from scratch, they can also be given new functions, such as generating fuels that do not ruin the planet or drugs in a much simpler and cheaper way. It is still a distant goal, but a team of researchers presented an important step towards achieving it last March.

For years, a handful of brilliant minds have pursued a common goal: to create life. That objective is not to procreate, or to play God, but to design and generate simple forms of life, capable of reproducing and proliferating by themselves. The theory says that if these life forms can be designed from scratch, they can also be given new functions, such as generating fuels that do not ruin the planet or drugs in a much simpler and cheaper way. It is still a distant goal, but a team of researchers presented an important step towards achieving it last March.

The team led by Jeff Boeke, from New York University, announced the first yeast (a type of single-celled fungus) that carries an artificial chromosome designed by his team. Chromosomes are the packages in which the genes of living beings are grouped and, in animals, they are the basic unit of inheritance transmitted by parents to children.

The selection of a yeast is not accidental. The Saccharomyces cerevisiae it is one of the organisms most used by humans in bread, beer, wine, and other foods and beverages. Also, from genetically modified yeasts, for example, insulin is manufactured for diabetics and its use is being explored for the manufacture of fuels from forest residues.

What Boeke's team did was assemble a complete chromosome by putting together 273,871 pieces of DNA. His work is based on that of Craig Venter, who in 2010 generated a bacterium whose entire genome had been artificially composed. Boeke has applied the same principles as Venter to modify a much more complex being, since yeast, unlike bacteria, has 16 chromosomes and belongs to the large group of eukaryotes, which includes all living things with cell nuclei.

For now, modifying entire chromosomes is only beneficial for basic knowledge of these organisms, says Manuel Porcar, expert in synthetic biology at the University of Valencia (Spain); but knowing what the functions of each of your genes are quickly will allow you to know them perfectly. Then they will begin to reprogram themselves with genes or chromosomes "on demand" to try to get these organisms to do things that they did not do naturally.