What Is a Yeast Artificial Chromosome?

Yeast artificial chromosomes (YAC) is a vector capable of cloning DNA fragments up to 400Kb in length. It contains the necessary telomeres, centromeres, and replication initiation sequences in yeast cells. Objects are easily dyed dark by alkaline dyes, so they are called chromosomes (chromatin). Its essence is deoxynucleotides, which are composed of nucleoproteins in the nucleus of cells, can be stained with basic dyes, and have structured linear bodies. Saccharomyces cerevisiae was the first eukaryotic organism to be sequenced whole genome.

Yeast artificial chromosome

On YAC

The YAC vector is mainly used to construct large fragment DNA libraries, especially for the construction of higher eukaryotic genomic libraries.

In 2014, Sc2.0 has created a single artificial yeast chromosome.

The world's top academic journal "Science", published on March 10, 2017, simultaneously published four research papers on the cover design and chemical synthesis of 4 eukaryotic Saccharomyces cerevisiae chromosomes completed by Chinese scientists. ^[1]

Saccharomyces cerevisiae is the first eukaryotic organism to be sequenced by the entire genome. The large-scale design and reconstruction of the yeast genome is a direct test of the authenticity, integrity, and accuracy of the current knowledge storage in the yeast field. Chemically synthesized yeast can help humans to understand some basic biological problems more deeply. On the other hand, it can use yeast rearrangement system to realize the rapid evolution of yeast. It can be used in medicine, energy, environment, agriculture, industry and other fields. Important application potential strains. ^[1]

Synthetic Biology is the third biotechnology revolution marked by the design and synthesis of genomes after the "Double Helix Discovery" and "Human Genome Sequencing Project". The most important classification basis in the biological community is neither plants and animals, nor multicellular and single-celled organisms, but the distinction between prokaryotes and eukaryotes. The genomes of prokaryotes such as bacteria and viruses are relatively simple, while the genes (DNA) of eukaryotes such as animals, plants, and fungi are rich and complex, and usually contain hundreds to billions of base pairs of information. At the same time, DNA as genetic material is usually assigned to different chromosomes, and these chromosomes are hidden in specific areas of the nucleus. Therefore, synthesizing the genome of a eukaryote is a very difficult task. However, if biology truly leads the technological revolution, synthetic eukaryotic genome technology will play a very central role. If the synthesis of the viral genome has started the study of chemical synthesis of the genome, the continuous breakthrough of the research on the combination of prokaryotes and eukaryotes has initially achieved the life regulation of chemically synthetic genomes on single cell prokaryotes and eukaryotes. ^[1]