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  • TECHNOLOGY FEATURE

How to build a genome

A powerful set of molecular tools helps synthetic biologists to assemble DNA of different sizes, from the gene to the chromosome scale.
  1. Michael Eisenstein

    1. Michael Eisenstein is a science writer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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Leslie Mitchell had no intention of doing a postdoc. After completing her PhD at the University of Ottawa, she had planned to move to industry. But then a member of her thesis committee, geneticist Jef Boeke, invited her to join his team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Boeke was spearheading an ambitious effort to design and build an entire yeast genome from scratch, known as the Sc2.0 project. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and one she just couldn’t refuse. “I just thought that was the coolest way to study biology and really understand it,” she says. “To build it from the ground up.”

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Nature 578, 633-635 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-00511-9

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