Assembling yeast chromosomes like Legos has a serious goal: safe lab-made creatures
“We sat around dumbfounded at first": Scientists create baker's yeast with "mega-chromosomes" in a step toward lab-made life.
Jef Boeke really, really wanted to avoid giving his yeast cells a “teeny weeny” chromosome. And not because the other yeast would make fun of them.
He was well into his trailblazing project to “write” the first complete genome (“reading,” or sequencing, genomes being 2000s), with the single-celled organism baker’s yeast the test case. As part of that scheme, he and his team had decided to fuse the yeast’s shortest chromosome with a longer one, in order to avoid the teeny-weeny problem — he worried that very
