Synthetic chromosome arms function in yeast and generate phenotypic diversity by design

part-synthetic yeast genome A milestone in biology was reached in 2010, with the production of a viable bacterium with a genome that had been reassembled artificially from synthetic DNA segments. Now Jef Boeke and colleagues report the production of the world's first synthetic eukaryotic chromosome arms, a first step in a project called Sc2.0, which aims to design and construct an entirely synthetic version of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae genome. In this initial phase, two custom-designed synthetic chromosome arms were incorporated into the yeast genome, replacing the endogenous sequence.