Organized by the Science and Technology Committee of the Ministry of Education, the 2017 "Ten major scientific and technological progress of China's colleges and Universities” Awards were unveiled in Beijing recently. Led by Professor Yuan Yingjin, in collaboration with NYU and John Hopkins in the US, Tsinghua University, BGI-Shenzhen in China, the University of Edinburgh in the UK, and the Institut Pasteur and Sorbonne Universités in France, as well as industry partners, TJU’s project of synthesis of redesigned yeast chromosomes was on the list.

Genome design and synthesis is a new design and de novo construction of genomes. It can create life on demand, open the door to transform non-living matter to living matter, and promote life science research from understanding life to creating life. It also provides a new method to deepen the understanding of basic scientific questions, such as life evolution, the genome and functional relationships. However, it is worth noting that obstacles are faced by genome synthesis, for example, it is difficult to accurately synthesize long chromosomes and synthesized chromosomes led to cell inactivation.

Teams led by Yuan Yingjin from Tianjin University, Yang Huanming from BGI-Shenzhen and Dai Junbiao from Tsinghua University, have assembled four synthetic yeast chromosomes after 5 years exploration.

Tianjin University’s research is part of the effort to chemically synthesize the designer yeast genome (Sc 2.0). Pursuing construction of the synthetic eukaryotic chromosome perfectly matching the designer sequence, the TJU research team overcame significant obstacles. Certain genetic alternations in the chromosome would affect cell fitness and cause "bugs"; debugging is therefore imperative for successfully building a synthetic genome. The malfunction of synthetic genomes remains one of the most common obstacles, as it is difficult to uncover the underlying causes. In a bid to tackle this problem, TJU developed a highly efficient debugging method called pooled PCRTag mapping (PoPM) by using a pooling strategy and the Sc2.0 PCRTag system, which is generalized to watermarked synthetic chromosomes. PoPM is a powerful tool for synthetic yeast genome debugging which accelerated the progress of the whole Sc2.0 project.

The research results were published in Science, attracting great attention from experts and the media at home and abroad and was highly praised by journals, such as "Science", "Nature", "Nature Biotechnology", "Nature Reviews Genetics" and "Molecular Cell".

Editors: Sun Xiaofang and Ross Colquhoun