The project of “accurate design and synthesis of long yeast chromosomes,” jointly completed by Dai Junbiao’s (KYM alumnus of Grade 1993) research team of Tsinghua University, Yuan Yingjin’s research team of Tianjin University, and Yang Huanming’s research team of BGI in Shenzhen, was on February 27, 2018, awarded one of the 2017 Top Ten Scientific Advances in China.
The design and synthesis of genome is a completely new task that can create life according to needs. It opens the door to transforming from inanimate substances into animate substances, and it promotes life science research to creating lives as opposed to the traditional research on understanding lives. The synthesis of genome, however, faces a series of difficulties. For instance, it is hard to perfectly synthesize long chromosomes and synthetic chromosomes cause cell inactivation.
The research teams were led by Yuan Yingjin, of Tianjin University, Dai Junbiao, of Tsinghua University, and Yang Huanming, of BGI, Shenzhen, and their collaborators. Based on the one-step large segment assembly technology and parallel chromosome synthesis strategy, they completed the design and synthesis from small molecule nucleotides to long chromosomes in living eukaryotes by using such methods as multilevel modularization and standardized artificial genome synthesis. They developed a precise genome restoration technology based on multi-target segment co-transformation and large segments of DNA restoration technology, succeeded in designing and constructing four long chromosomes of saccharomyces cerevisiae, and accurately matched eukaryotic long chromosome synthesis sequences with design sequences. They established a method of rapid localization of genomic defect targets and provided a new strategy for association analysis of phenotypes and genotypes. Through the localization and exclusion of defect targets, the problem that synthetic genomes cause cell inactivation has been solved. On this basis, artificial ring chromosomes have been constructed, and this was conducive to building research models for identifying pathogenesis and potential treatments of the untreatable chromosomal ring disease. This research has provided a new idea of deeply understanding basic scientific problems such as life evolution and the relationship between genomes and its functions.
Four papers about the research progress of perfect design and synthesis of long yeast chromosomes were published on Science on March 10, 2017. [Science, 355(6329): eaaf4704, eaaf4706, eaaf4791, eaaf3981]
This research has attracted great attention from experts and media at home and abroad. Meanwhile, Science even published an article commenting on this research result. Several top journals including Nature, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Reviews Genetics, and Molecular Cell also published articles introducing the highlights of the research. It was highly appraised and considered a milestone in the first full synthesis of eukaryotic genome.
The selection of Top10 Scientific Advances in China has been held by the High Technology Research and Development Center, the Ministry of Science and Technology. By 2018, it had held 13 sessions. These research advances were recommended by editorial departments of top journals including China Basic Science, Science & Technology Review, Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Bulletin of National Natural Science Foundation of China, and Chinese Science Bulletin and were selected after a primary and a final ballots by experts and scholars including academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese Academy of Engineering, experts from the consultant group and advisory group of the Major National Basic Research Development Program of China (973 Program), the chief scientists of 973 Program, and the directors of the State Key Laboratories.
This activity is aimed to strengthen the publicity of China’s major progress in basic research, encourage scientists’ and technicians’ enthusiasm and dedication to work, promote the public understanding, care and support for science, and create a good scientific atmosphere in society. This activity has become a brand of publicizing China’s basic scientific research and produced a good response in the science and technology circles.
(reposted by Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences)
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Dai Junbiao is a research fellow at Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He graduated from Department for Intensive Instruction, Nanjing University, in 1997. He received his master’s in biotechnology and science from Tsinghua University in 2000 and obtained his doctorate in Iowa State University in 2006. He has engaged in postdoctoral research at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Medicine from 2006 to 2011 and has served as a research fellow at School of Life Sciences, Tsinghua University, from 2011 to 2017.
Dai at his laboratory studies epigenetics and synthetic biology and developed gene synthesis, gene assembly, and technologies for genome-wide design and synthesis. He is also a leading member of International Synthetic Yeast Genome Project. He has published more than 40 papers on such journals as Cell, Nature, Science, Molecular Cell, PNAS, and Nucleic Acid Res and has applied for or been authorized for eight patents. Among them, his paper published on Cell in 2008 was selected as the cover paper. He and his collaborative team, Sc2.0, published five cover papers and monographs about chromosome synthesis on Science in March 2017 and were selected as one of 2017 Top10 Scientific Advances in China. In 2011, he received Albert Lehninger Research Award from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Medicine. In the same year, he was selected into the first batch of the youths of the CPC’s Organization Department. He was awarded the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars in 2017.
