Australia rises to the challenge of creating synthetic yeast

Australia has joined the Yeast 2.0 project, an international effort to create the world’s first ever synthetic complex organism: a particular strain of yeast. Australia is represented in the consortium by Macquarie University, in collaboration with the Australian Wine Research Institute (AWRI).

The project began when Professor Jef Boeke, of New York University, published the synthesis of Chromosome III of a lab strain of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae in the journal Science. The aim of Yeast 2.0 is to synthesise the other 15 chromosomes, eventually generating the first fully synthetic yeast by 2017.

Professor Boeke explained that the yeast genome, which consists of 16 chromosomes, is like an encyclopaedia with 16 volumes. “Each volume can be broken down into chapters, paragraphs, words and letters,” he said - the base pairs of DNA forming the letters A, C, T and G.

“The way we do this is we string together enough letters into words, words into paragraphs and paragraphs into chapters, outside of yeast,” Professor Boeke said. “And then we take that large DNA fragment … and we introduce it into a laboratory yeast strain.” Scientists swap out the natural version of the first ‘chapter’ for the synthetic one - which has been modified from the original form - and then proceed to the same for the next 10 chapters.

The other chromosomes will be assembled all over the world, including the US, UK, China, Singapore and tentatively, India. When Macquarie University’s Professor Sakkie Pretorius wrote to Professor Boeke concerned about Australia’s lack of large-scale synthetic biology research, he found himself being assigned Chromosome XIV.

“I was very lucky that the NSW Government, especially through the NSW Chief Scientist and Engineer, Professor Mary O’Kane, backed this whole concept of helping Australia to not miss the synthetic biology boat, and she helped me to access external funding,” Professor Pretorius said. The NSW Department of Primary Industries and the NSW Office for Science & Research are each contributing $500,000 in funding.

The implications of the project will be significant. As noted by Dr Dan Johnson, managing director of the AWRI, yeast is used in a wide variety of industrial contexts, including flavours and fragrances, bread, biofuels, fermented beverages and pharmaceuticals. Not only will the project “improve the fundamental level of information about [how yeast works] in a laboratory environment”, he said, but the potential development of different strains could introduce benefits to various industrial processes.

Furthermore, noted Professor Pretorius, it will open up possibilities in other areas. “Once we can synthesise an organism like yeast, we can then apply the same techniques to increasingly more complex organisms,” he said. “The possibilities in medicine, or the environment, for example, are truly mind-blowing.”