Chemists first probed the structure of matter using analytic 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 biological species to a synthetic genome age; this transition demands a whole new level of biological understanding, which has been formalized as the new discipline of "Synthetic Biology" (SynBio). A great deal of energy and effort has been invested by the principal investigators into a new undergraduate course, "Build A Genome", in which students produce the Building Blocks used as starting materials for chromosome assembly. This course will be expanded dramatically by "franchising" it to other Colleges and Universities, thereby engaging a highly motivated workforce directly in the project and providing unparalleled training/learning opportunities for students nationwide, and eventually, internationally. The eventual "synthetic yeast" that will be designed and refined is likely to play an important practical role. Yeasts, and S. cerevisiae in particular, are preeminent organisms for industrial fermentations, with a wide variety of practical uses including ethanol production from agricultural products and by-products.
This project uses the model eukaryote S. cerevisiae as the basis for a cell with a synthetic genome "Sc2.0" that can be used to answer a wide variety of profound questions about fundamental properties of chromosomes, genome organization, gene content, the function of RNA splicing, the extent to which small RNAs play a role in eukaryotic biology, the distinction between prokaryotes and eukaryotes, and the intimate relationship between genome structure and evolution. The availability of a fully synthetic genome will allow direct testing of evolutionary questions that are not otherwise approachable. S. cerevisiae is the organism of choice for these studies because the genomic and related resources available are quite simply better than for any other organism. This offers the opportunity to apply extensive yeast systems biology information to the design of chromosomes for the organism. It is anticipated that Sc2.0 will differ from the native organism, and the multitude of genetic assays available for the organism can be used to understand phenotypic differences that might be observed.
