NEW YORK (AP) – Scientists are working to create yeast that operates with custom-made DNA.
They have long been able to make specific changes in an organism’s DNA. Now, they’re pushing into the more radical step of starting over, and building redesigned versions from scratch.
Their work is part of a bold and controversial pursuit aimed at creating custom-made DNA codes to be inserted into living cells to change how they function, or even provide treatments for diseases. It could also someday help give scientists the profound and unsettling ability to create entirely new organisms.
The genetic code is like a book written with an alphabet of only four letters: A, C, G, and T. Chemical building blocks that correspond to these letters line up in DNA molecules like links in a chain; genes are made up of specific sequences of those building blocks. These sequences tell the yeast cell how to build particular proteins.
The complete DNA code for yeast, called its genome, contains about 12 million letters. An international scientific team aims to add, delete or alter about a million of the DNA letters.