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Scientists hail synthetic chromosome advance
- jobu 13y agoVery cool. I can't wait until the tools for building living organisms are comparable to those for programming computers.
- daniel-levin 13y agoHave you seen [0]? This is biological CAD. IMHO about as cool as it gets. [0] http://www.genomecompiler.com/ http://www.genomecompiler.com/
- ch4s3 13y agoThat is about as cool as it gets!
- ChuckMcM 13y agoCool and scary at the same time. Yeast 'engines' would be very efficient chemical factories. Unfortunately accidents at the chemical factory are rarely 'harmless.'
- andyjohnson0 13y agoNature article with a lot more detail: http://www.nature.com/news/first-synthetic-yeast-chromosome-revealed-1.14941 http://www.nature.com/news/first-synthetic-yeast-chromosome-...
- yohann305 13y agoThis is one step closer towards space colonization, keep it up!
- Houshalter 13y agoModifying existing biology is probably easier than building nanotech from scratch. I'm pretty excited about the possibilities. How does someone get into this?
- twic 13y agoI'm a bit nonplussed. We already have very good tools for precisely making arbitrary changes to existing chromosomes. Creating one from scratch is a cool party trick, but it doesn't actually seem all that useful. Unless you are also proposing to design a chromosome from scratch, which nobody is. It is extra fun that this was done by massed ranks of undergraduates working in ordinary labs, though. You could call this a sort of crowdsourced sharing economy of genomics. Or a genomic sweatshop, depending on your inclinations.