The way to a chemically synthesized yeast genome

Speaker: Yue Shen, Director of Genome Synthesis and Editing Platform, China National GeneBank, China

Host: Professor Guojie Zhang, Ecology and Evolution, BIO-UCPH

Abstract
Under the collaborative framework of the Synthetic Yeast 2.0 (Sc2.0) project, we report the successful design, construction and characterization of a synthetic yeast chromosome II, synII. SynII was designed based on the native chromosome II following previously reported rules (do no harm, maintain genomics stability and increase genetic flexibility), resulting in a “designer” chromosome 770 kb in length, 43 kb shorter than the native sequence. Extensive Trans-Omics tests indicated that synII yeast, despite significant sequence alterations, is virtually indistinguishable from wild type. Unexpectedly, our analyses revealed that upregulation of many components of the translational machinery (for example ribosomal proteins at both the RNA and protein levels) is a typical feature of synthetic chromosome replacement strains. However, despite these very specific and subtle differences, the Trans-Omics analysis provides explicit evidence that biological processes within the synII strain are highly consistent with the wild-type strain. Our result shows that the yeast genome displays a great degree of plasticity, and can readily cope with the large degree of editing encoded into synII.