>
What Happens If We Don't Change Course: Earth Day 2050?
Port Of Baltimore Partially Reopens, Allowing Trapped Cargo Ships To Exit
"Stand Back and Let It Fall": Jonathan Turley Says Alvin Bragg's Case Against Trump Is
Nearsightedness is at epidemic levels
Blazing bits transmitted 4.5 million times faster than broadband
Scientists Close To Controlling All Genetic Material On Earth
Doodle to reality: World's 1st nuclear fusion-powered electric propulsion drive
Phase-change concrete melts snow and ice without salt or shovels
You Won't Want To Miss THIS During The Total Solar Eclipse (3D Eclipse Timeline And Viewing Tips
China Room Temperature Superconductor Researcher Had Experiments to Refute Critics
5 video games we wanna smell, now that it's kinda possible with GameScent
Unpowered cargo gliders on tow ropes promise 65% cheaper air freight
Wyoming A Finalist For Factory To Build Portable Micro-Nuclear Plants
The study, published in Science, describes an approach that efficiently forms single-copy HACs, bypassing a common hurdle that has hindered progress in this field for decades.
Artificial chromosomes are lab-made structures designed to mimic the function of natural chromosomes, the packaged bundles of DNA found in the cells of humans and other organisms. These synthetic constructs have the potential to serve as vehicles for delivering therapeutic genes or as tools for studying chromosome biology. However, previous attempts to create HACs have been plagued by a major issue: the DNA segments used to build them often link together in unpredictable ways, forming long, tangled chains with rearranged sequences.
The Penn Medicine team, led by Dr. Ben Black, sought to overcome this challenge by completely overhauling the approach to HAC design and delivery. "The HAC we built is very attractive for eventual deployment in biotechnology applications, for instance, where large-scale genetic engineering of cells is desired," Dr. Black explains in a media release. "A bonus is that they exist alongside natural chromosomes without having to alter the natural chromosomes in the cell."
To test their idea, the scientists turned to a tried-and-true workhorse of molecular biology: yeast. They used a technique called transformation-associated recombination (TAR) cloning to assemble a whopping 750 kilobase DNA construct in yeast cells. For context, that's about 25 times larger than the constructs used in previous HAC studies. The construct contained DNA from both human and bacterial sources, as well as sequences to help seed the formation of the centromere.
The next challenge was to deliver this hefty payload into human cells. The team accomplished this by fusing the engineered yeast cells with a human cell line, a process that had been optimized in previous studies. Remarkably, this fusion approach proved to be much more efficient than the traditional method of directly transferring naked DNA into cells.