With the rapid development of DNA synthesis technologies, synthetic biology has made tremendous progress in the past 15 years, in particular for synthetic genomics. Synthetic genomics is a nascent field of synthetic biology, which aims to design new biological systems/organisms to satisfy human needs. Conventional synthetic biology focuses on the redesign, construction and modeling of biological parts, pathways or genomes that do not exist in nature, while synthetic genomics encompasses technologies that allow the generation of chemically synthesized larger parts of genomes or whole genomes, with simultaneous redesign of an organism's genetic material. Synthetic genomics is painting a blueprint for a new era of biology and holds great potential for a multitude of applications, such as pharmaceuticals, biofuels and rapid generation of vaccines against emerging diseases. Chapter One gives an introduction of the current state of the art and challenges of synthetic genomics and the objectives of this study. Chapter Two demonstrates the design and construction strategy of two megabase-long synthetic yeast chromosomes, SynII and SynVII. Chapter Three describes the full characterization of SynII and SynVII. Chapter Four introduces the SCRaMbLE (Synthetic Chromosome Rearrangement and Modification by LoxPsym-mediated Evolution) system and its application in SynII and SynVII. Taken together, this work demonstrates the utility of synthetic yeast for understanding biological systems and its potential for industrial applications.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:764000 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Shen, Yue |
| Contributors | French, Chris ; Cai, Yizhi |
| Publisher | University of Edinburgh |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/1842/33182 |
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