For GSS Losing Biodiversity chapter 4. Excerpt: ...Using the labor of
dozens of undergraduate students, scientists have built a customized
yeast chromosome from scratch. It's a milestone in the rapidly growing
field of synthetic biology, where organisms can be tailored for
industrial use. In this case, the near-term goal is to understand the
genetics of yeast, and eventually the genetics of us. This was quite an
undertaking. Yeast have about 6,000 genes packed in 16 tidy bundles
called chromosomes. Each chromosome is an enormous molecule of DNA
packed in proteins. ...[Jef] Boeke and his colleagues put together a
class, called Build-A-Genome, and got undergraduates at Hopkins to do
the painstaking labor of constructing long strings of DNA. These would
eventually become segments of their yeast chromosome. ...To make the
chromosome useful for research, they've deleted some parts of the DNA
that they believe are not essential, "and then we add a number of bells
and whistles to the chromosome, that we think will make for a more
interesting version that we can play evolutionary games with in the
laboratory," Boeke says. ...Of course, this deep manipulation of DNA
also raises ethical questions — about everything from patenting
life-forms, to the potential misuse of biotechnology for weapons or
other nefarious purposes. So part of the class involved an ethics
discussion, led by Debra Mathews, a bioethicist at Johns Hopkins.... http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/03/27/295260600/custom-chromo-first-yeast-chromosome-built-from-scratch. Richard Harris, NPR. |
Updates >