Diversity by Design

The recent Nature paper from Jef Boeke’s group , “ Synthetic chromosome arms function in yeast and generate phenotypic diversity by design ,” begins with an appropriately futuristic sentence: “The first phase of any genome engineering project is design.” While there have been efforts to redesign viral genomes and chemically synthesize bacterial genomes , whole genomes of living cells are not yet something that can readily be designed from scratch. This new paper (excellently reviewed by Lab Rat a while back) approaches the design of genomes in a fascinating way; instead of trying to decide in advance what a good engineered/engineerable genome looks like or simply copying an existing genome, they designed the sequence of one arm of a yeast chromosome (about 90,000 base pairs) with built-in genetic flexibility, enabling future experiments and future evolution. [More]

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Diversity by Design