Synthetic Yeast Will Evolve on Command, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Study

Yeast is going digital. Biologists have built two artificial chromosome arms and put them to work in a living yeast. They plan to replace the entire yeast genome over the next five years and then evolve new strains to order. "Nothing like this has ever been done before," says Jef Boeke of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, who is leading the research. As well as designing and building the new genome from scratch, his team has come up with a way to systematically scramble it to produce new strains.