Recent Sc2.0
Data and Finished Chromosomes
Learn more about the design and experimental characterization of each finished chromosomes. The GFF3 version includes the annotation and the FASTA sequence record. The WT version is for the S288c reference strain and the synthetic version is the final design target.
Ethics & Governance
A number of guidelines have been proposed in response to the ethics issues, including safety, raised by synthetic biology. Our published commentary describes the balance between freedom and responsibility in synthetic genomics: Sliva et al 2015 Genetics.
Currently, the NIH Guidelines for Research Involving Recombinant DNA Molecules serves as the main document guiding NIH-funded synthetic biology research. These guidelines focus on DNA synthesis companies as the primary point of intervention; other guidelines focus on the researchers themselves.
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Goals
Chemists first probing the structure of matter used analytical approaches, describing what they perceived. They subsequently gained a far more thorough mastery of and insights into chemical compounds by synthesizing them. Biology is now undergoing a similar transition from the age of deciphering DNA sequence information of the genomes of biological species to a synthetic genome age; and this transition demands a whole new level of biological understanding, which we currently lack.
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Safety
The yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae has been in use by humans since at least the ancient Sumerians and is consumed daily, in various forms, by billions of people. As such, the organism is Generally Regarded As Safe (GRAS) by the United States Food and Drug Association (FDA). Our experiments utilize strains of the BY lineage, directly derived from the S288C strain, which has been undergoing laboratory propagation since its isolation from a rotting fig in Merced, California, in 1938.
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SCRaMbLE and Sc2.0-Related Technology
The Sc2.0 project has inspired related technologies and projects, many directly generated by Sc2.0 activities.
Synthetic Chromosome Recombination and Modification by LoxP-mediated Evolution – SCRaMbLE – using Sc2.0 to generate and explore combinatorial genome diversity The Dark Matter Project using synthetic biology to understand regulatory genomics and non-protein-coding DNA Science Across Virtual Institutes – SAVI – an NSF initiative for international collaborations Genome Project Write – GP-write – extending the concepts of Sc2.
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tRNA neochromosome
The tRNA neochromosome contains all 275 nuclear tRNA genes of yeast. Its design is based on rational principles and it will be the sole source of tRNA expression in the final Sc2.0 strain. A neochromosome is defined as a synthetic chromosome that has no natural counterpart but has all the characteristics of a chromosome within a cell. It has a copy number of one and replicates in a cell cycle dependent manner.
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Why Yeast?
The best explanation may be an apocryphal quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin: “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy”. S. cerevisiae is the organism of choice for these studies because the genomic and related resources that are available are, quite simply, better than for any other organism on the planet. There are eukaryotes with smaller genomes, to be sure, but the extent of knowledge about these species pales by comparison to S.
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