Tag Archives: jef boeke

Genome editing meets version control

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BioStudio screenshot

Consider for a moment the logistics of rewriting a genome from scratch. Starting from a reference genome sequence, you nip and tuck, recode and reorganize. Changes to any one element changes the genetic coordinates of every element downstream, meaning the process requires consider genetic bookkeeping.

Joel Bader, Jef Boeke, and an international team of colleagues faced precisely that problem as they rebuilt five chromosomes from the yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae – an effort Amy Maxmen covered yesterday in Nature News. Continue reading →

Painting with yeast

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Science magazine

Today, an international research team led by Jef Boeke of New York University Langone Medical Center and Joel Bader at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, reported in Science a remarkable feat – the complete de novo synthesis and redesign of five yeast chromosomes, a first step towards a completely synthetic model eukaryote. Over at Nature News, Amy Maxmen has done an admirable job covering that achievement, part of a project called Sc2.0. What I’d like to talk about is one of the artistic flourishes used to illustrate it. Continue reading →