Category Archives: Evolution

Forbes

'Pokmon GO' Gen 2 Feels Fruitless Because 16 New Pokmon Can't Hatch From Eggs Forbes Minus 8 Pokmon that only evolve from Gen 2 evolution items, which, as I've discussed many times, are often insanely rare, as many players may get one or two after weeks of streaks and hundreds of PokeStop spins. And those that do have some are never ...

See the original post here:

'Pokmon GO' Gen 2 Feels Fruitless Because 16 New Pokmon Can't Hatch From Eggs - Forbes

We're creating a positive news network. We need your help.

The word ego has such a negative connotation. We refer to people with a detrimental amount of narcism as having big egos. And often, we find our ego is the biggest force between what we think we can do, and what we can actually do.

The ego is an energetic form or structure within our individual experiences that separates us from our higher self. It is, in a sense, a false sense of self. The ego hides behind the I and me in such statements as:

I am ugly.

I am perfect.

I could never do that.

No one can ever do that as good as me.

No one loves me.

Having such thoughts, and agreeing with even the faintest conviction that they define us, creates and supports the ego.

However, it is easy to be unaware when this is happening to you, and so we find ourselves stuck trying to discern the difference between what is really us, and what is simply the ego. After all, we have spent years living our true selves, as well as building our ego self-images. But the two do not have to coincide. In fact, it is completely possible to extract the genuine self out of the grip of falsities that merely create daily obstacles in our lives.

Here are four examples of opportunities to reduce ego in daily lives:

Many of the successes that come to define us are merely meant to feed the ego. In the words ofEckhart Tolle, On a deeper level you are already complete. When you realize that, there is a playful, joyous energy behind what you do. Your achievements do not make you a better person, but they do make your ego feel this way. When you feel inclined to share a success of yours, try practicing giving credit to someone else, such as a mentor who helped you.

Humility is one of those words that makes many of us cringe. People fear being embarrassed; being humiliated. But there is nothing noble about escaping such a fate. Embracing humility robs the ego of its comfort zone. And in moments when you open your arms to such a thing, you will find you arent thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.

Its easy to get caught up in the what-ifs of life. What if you dont fit in? What if people dont like you? Once again, this is merely your ego hindering you from living your life to its fullest. Dont get attached to such questions or concerns, and instead embrace the discomfort as a transition from what you dont yet know to what you soon will.

Though your thoughts, feelings, and words are important, its easy to put them on such a pedestal that you stop listening to others, even cutting them off to insert your viewpoints.Allowing others to truly hold the floor allows you to develop better listening skills as well. There is a reason people use objects in groups to symbolize whose turn it is to speak, while others must listen until they have passed the object onward. Humans can be impatient, yes, but its really more about the desire to speak your mind. This is merely the ego, however.

Your life path number can tell you A LOT about you.

With the ancient science of Numerology you can find out accurate and revealing information just from your name and birth date.

Get your free numerology reading and learn more about how you can use numerology in your life to find out more about your path and journey. Get Your free reading.

Read more:

4 Techniques For Reducing Ego In Your Daily Life - Collective Evolution

Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould once pondered what would happen if the cassette tape of life were rewound and played again. Synthetic biologists have tested one aspect of this notion by engineering chromosomes from scratch, sticking them into yeast and seeing whether the modified organisms can still function normally.

They do, according to seven papers published today inSciencethat describe the creation, testing and refining of five redesigned yeast chromosomes. Together witha sixth previously synthesized chromosome, they represent more than one-third of the genome of the bakers yeastSaccharomycescerevisiae.An international consortium of more than 200 researchers that created the chromosomes expects to complete a fully synthetic yeast genome by the end of the year.

The work the team has already done could help to optimizethe creation of microbes to pump out alcohol, drugs, fragrances and fuel. And it serves as a guide for future research on how genomes evolve and function.

The amazing thing here is that they are figuring out how to tweak the genomenot just synthesize itthrough a design-build-test-learn cycle, says Jack Newman, co-founder of Amyris Biotechnologies in Emeryville, California. The approach is similar to one that computer scientists might take when trying to understand a computer code written a decade ago, he adds, although the task is much harder with genomes that have undergone millions of years of evolution. Yeast originated more than 50 million years ago, when theSaccharomyceslineage branched off from other fungi.

In 2010, geneticist Craig Venter and his team revealedthe first synthetic genome, a stripped-down version of the genetic code from a bacterial parasite,Mycoplasma mycoides. Four years later, a team led by Jef Boeke, a yeast geneticist at New York University Langone Medical Center in New York City, synthesizeda chromosome from yeast, a more complex organism that is classified as a eukaryotea group that also includes plants, worms and people.

Venters goal was to realizethe smallest genome needed to sustain life, but Boeke sought to explore fundamental questions about evolution, such as whether yeasts could have evolved through alternate routes. He turned the query into a hypothesis testable with synthetic biology: how much can you change a genome and still have a working organism?

To look for an answer, Boeke assigned each ofS. cerevisiaes 16 chromosomes to teams of collaborators, spread across the United States, United Kingdom, China, Singapore and Australia. Each was to create a chromosome that was stable yet evolvable, and would keep yeast functioning as usual.

The teams used computer programs to design the codes of their respective chromosomes. They omitted some sequences found in naturally occurring yeast chromosomes, such as repetitive parts of the genome, in hopes of increasing the stability of the synthetic versions. And they endowed their creations with a mechanism that mimics the random variation that drives evolution. When this scrambling system is triggered, it can shuffle, duplicate and delete genes at random.

A team led by researchers at the Pasteur Institute in Paris documented dramatic structural changes in the nucleus of the synthetic yeasteven as it continued to thrive, making proteins and reproducing. It seems like we can really kind of torture the genome in complicated ways and frequently the yeast shrugs its shoulders and grows like normal, Boeke says.

Some teams in the consortium invented techniques to rapidly identify errors in synthetic chromosomes. Another group, led researchers at Tianjin University in China, optimized techniques to remove bugs in the genetic sequences of the chromosomes, in one instance by using the gene-editing tool CRISPRCas9.

Considering that they synthesized 536,024 base pairs in that chromosome and only used CRISPR to mess around with 45 of them is kind of refreshing, says George Church, a geneticist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It makes you feel like maybe this is the next big thing.

Genome synthesis is unlikely to displace tools such as CRISPR, which allow scientists to add or subtract a limited number of genes in an organism, he says. But it may become the favoured method for applications that require complicated genetic changes. This includes engineering yeast and other microbes to produce fragrances and other materials; manufacturers that rely on such microbes could use synthetic genomes to make those organisms more resilient to harmful viruses, for example.

If you took those [microbe] strains offline and reprogrammed their code, then put them back in, the viruses would be so far out of touch they couldnt come back, Church says. It would be like going back to the Middle Ages and giving one country hydrogen bombs.

Several groups have launched efforts to synthesize genomes from species such as the bacteriumEscherichia coliand from people. Boeke is confident that his consortium will create a fully synthetic yeast genome by the years end. The team has already created several additional chromosomes, and is debugging and testing them.

The groups latest results will encourage others to dream big, Church says: Theyve been able to induce radical changes in the code, so it emboldens you to be even more radical.

This article is reproduced with permission and wasfirst publishedon March 9, 2017.

The rest is here:

Synthetic Yeast Chromosomes Help Probe Mysteries of Evolution - Scientific American

By Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch

It is still a long way to a new generation of open scientists, German open data researcher Christian Heise found out in his just-published PhD thesis. Heise not only investigated drivers and barriers for what he expects to be an evolution from open access to open science by theory and a survey of over 1100 scientists. He tried the concept open science the hard way, opening up the writing of his thesis paper on the net.

About the first open PhD thesis, see here.

Interested fellow researchers, friends and family were able to see how the research developed and the text grew. To explore this, Heise had to get a special permission from the university, Leuphana University in Lueneburg, Germany, because a PhD thesis usually has to fulfil certain criteria with regard to recency and originality. It took close to a year to solve the legal issues alone.

Heise had made sure that the work would be his own. Direct comments on the PhD thesis blog were not possible which in some way made additional innovative steps like collaboration directly on the text impossible. Challenges he faced during the process, according to his resume, were also technical as there was a lack of tools for handling evolving versions of such a large text, plus additional material like survey data and literature research. In the end, Heise changed to GitHub, a tool well-known by open source developers.

Additional qualifications (programming) and a bigger work-load made two of the barriers on the way towards becoming an open scientist. But Heise also stated that while a majority of scientists favor open access and faster time to market/public for their research, the scientific communication system had remained highly stable.

It was not only the big publishing houses pushing to keep their business models, but also a certain level of inertia in the scientific community that is causing the persistence.

A process to negotiate next steps in the development of open science following earlier processes on open access (see here and here) is needed, he said.

Link:

Inertia Slows Evolution For Open Scientists - Intellectual Property Watch

Our brains have a finite capacity for processing information and for remembering, and the bigger the brain, the more oxygen and sugar it takes to maintain. Photo by psdesign1/via Adobe

Math may solve why people are such eggheads. A new model published Thursday in PLOS Computational Biology mathematically illustrates what led to the evolution of humans abnormally large brains.

Evolutionary biologists devised these equations to tease apart the relationship between human brain size and the cost of maintaining a large brain. Over the last few decades, the pace and stages of brain growth in humans have become clearer. From birth to preschool, our brains quadruple in size. Our brains reach 90 percent of their final size by six years old, and they continue to grow slowly through adolescence until stopping in our mid-20s.

The question is: Why?

Anthropologists have hypothesized made educated speculations about what factors in human evolution drive this pace. For example, newborns heavily rely on their families, so they can develop strong social bonds during their youth. As humans get older, we increasingly learn to be self-sufficient, use tools and learn of our environments. Scientists speculate both of these habits contribute to brain growth, but they dont know which of these factors or others have the greatest bearing. A standard mathematical model could provide clarity by quantitatively comparing hypotheses.

Anthropologists can plug in their hypotheses to the model, which then predicts brain size from birth to adulthood based on those numbers. If those numbers match what we know about the pace of human brain development, then the model supports the hypothesis.

With this model, you can obtain predictions for each of the hypotheses to see which hypothesis yields a better prediction, said evolutionary biologist Mauricio Gonzlez-Forero of Universit de Lausanne in France, who led the study.

The final model states that adult skill level equals adult brain mass times the cost of maintaining brain tissue divided by the cost of memory times a constant. Stated in laymens terms, this idea means as adult brain mass increases, so too does adult skill, assuming that the costs of maintaining the brain mass and memory stay constant.

These costs include eating a lot in order to maintain the brain. Brains make up 2 percent of our bodies, but consume 20 percent of our oxygen and sugars in our food to sustain the activity of billions of neurons. This mental gorging could have been a disadvantage for early humans thousands of years ago, because bigger diets, consisting of more calories, means having to spend more time hunting and foraging for food. If their evolving brains drained too much food and oxygen, then they might have been too tired to fend for themselves.

While there is debate among anthropologists, many believe that social interaction is a major factor in increasing brain size. Knowing people, communicating with them and maintaining relationships takes a lot of brainpower.

Gonzlez-Foreros model counters this narrative and asserts that humans gain more intelligence as they learn to use technology, which University of Wisconsin-Madison evolutionary anthropologist John Hawks describes as a controversial but revealing take on brain development.

Many anthropologists look at the pace of brain growth in terms of social interactions, he added, but this paper is saying maybe social relationships dont have anything to do with it. Its really neat to see such a cool, clear statement of that because it gives us a target.

Originally posted here:

Why did humans evolve big brains? We don't know, but math can help - PBS NewsHour

Some people call pho the national dish of Vietnam, but it's origins are somewhat recent. If you haven't attempted pho, you're in luck, because the great Andrea Nguyen has written The Pho Cookbook. Andrea currently lives in northern California, but she was born in and lived as a child in Vietnam. Andrea recently talked with The Splendid Table host Francis Lam about the history of pho and finding a taste of home in the US. She also provided recipes for Quick Chicken Pho and Seafood Pho, as well the accompanying Chile Sauce and Pho Garnish Plate.

Francis Lam: Lots of cultures have dishes that just make people go, That's it. That's me. That is the food of my people. Pho is certainly one of those dishes for many Vietnamese people. Do you remember your first bowl?

Andrea Nguyen: I sure do. In fact, I remember it so well because my family often reminds me of how when I was about five years old and we were living in Saigon, my parents took me to one of their favorite pho joints. I sat there as a chubby little five-year-old, chopsticks and spoon in my hands, digging into my bowl, working my way all the way down to the bottom and emptying it. Everyone thought that it was so wonderful. They marveled at this little kid. I was hooked on that soup.

FL: This is 1974. Only a year later, your family left Vietnam, coming to the United States as refugees. Obviously, there are a million changes in your life when that happens, but you seem to remember specifically that when you got here there were no pho shops to be found.

AN: Yes. We were very fortunate to have been able to flee Vietnam a week before the fall of Saigon. Like a lot of Vietnamese refugees, we had very little to bring with us. We traded personal possessions for freedom in America. My family settled in a little beach community called San Clemente, California. But in gaining our freedom we lost access to pho shops. I remember feeling sad about that. So, we ended up making our own pho shop essentially in our home. I'm the youngest of five children. My mom would make pho up on Saturday so that we could enjoy it Sunday morning for brunch after eight o'clock mass.

FL: Its thought of as a street food typically, right? Is this something that people make at home in Vietnam, or is it something you go out for?

AN: Some people make it at home, but most people go out for it. It is a street food. A lot of food in Vietnam is street food, in the sense that people have store fronts where you set up little plastic baby chairs and tables or wooden benches, and you just open up shop. It's as if you were to open up your garage door and welcome people in to eat and give you a little money. Not a lot of people made it, but my mother, along with other refugee friends of ours, would talk about the essence of good pho that they had in Vietnam, and they would trade secrets. Over the years, that kind of became the Vietnamese-American pho flavor, which was a little more sweet than savory because it's a Saigon-based pho broth.

FL: It's an unusual food in that it's one of the foods that has a fairly recent history and yet it is central to this cuisine in this culture. It seems the specific origin myth has lots of different interpretations of it, but it seems like there's a definite sense of where it came from and how it's evolved over time. Can you talk about that?

Andrea Nguyen (Photo: Genevieve Pierson)

AN: People look at a bowl of pho and they think its an ancient food, but it's not. It was invented sometime around the beginning of the 20th century in and around Hanoi; it's a Northern Vietnamese food. If you look at a map of Vietnam, Hanoi is very close to the Chinese. China is right there with their neighbors, and they influenced Vietnam on and off for a total of 1,000 years. The first pho was invented probably by someone of Chinese origin and sold as street food to a lot of coolies who worked on the Red River. Vietnam was under French colonial power at that point. The reason why pho came about was that the French colonials started slaughtering a lot of cows. Cows are traditionally draft animals, so there were a lot of spare parts left: tough cuts and bones. The Vietnamese street vendors at that time had a water buffalo, rice noodle, and broth dish. All of the sudden, there were these great sales on beef. The butchers were pushing a lot of beef, and the Vietnamese weren't used to eating beef, because the cows were supposed to be working in the fields for you.

The street vendors saw an opportunity; they switched the beef for the water buffalo. Eventually, they switched the round rice noodles -- the vermicelli type of noodles for a flat rice noodle, which is what we identify nowadays with pho or pad Thai. They kept tweaking things, so that eventually we have pho as what we know it today. A lot of people think that pho is somehow related to French pot-au-feu

FL: Because of the name?

AN: Exactly. Theyre homophones and there may be something in the notion of how the aromatics the ginger and the onion or shallot are charred at the beginning. But aside from that, I really don't see a direct descendency from French pot-au-feu.

FL: It's interesting that it's this product of history: the fact of French colonialization and the fact that the French wanted to eat beef. You combine that with Vietnamese ingenuity to take what was the byproduct of that new butchery, and you created this iconic dish.

The Pho Cookbook by Andrea Nguyen

AN: It was a collision of cultures, people rubbing shoulders of different classes. It's always going to be a Vietnamese dish because it happened on Vietnamese soil under an unusual set of circumstances.

FL: If you're making pho at home, what should you know?

AN: On the first try, people want to make sure that they've got plenty of ginger and onion or shallot. We use a lot of yellow onion in this United States because it's affordable and readily available. The first recipe in the book for a Quick Chicken Pho and there are two other quick pho recipes is made for you to dive in and make pho on a weeknight. Really simple, but the trick there is to get that kind of sear, that char that I was talking about earlier on the aromatics the ginger and the onion. When I talk about ginger, I'm talking about a chubby, fat, knobby ginger. I'm talking about the size of your big toe. A lot of people think chubby is like thumb-sized. No, big toe-sized!

FL: My big toe feels so judged right now.

AN: I would have no shame. The big toe is an important measurement.

FL: For charring, not just giving it a little caramel. You almost set it on fire, right?

AN: Thats for when you're making super traditional pho in a stock pot. If you're doing a quickie for 40 minutes just to put pho on the table, all I do is I cut up those aromatics and give it a little sear in a hot pot. When I'm charring it on an open fire, that's like going old-school cooking in a stock pot. There is also a middle path, which is to use a pressure cooker. There what you're doing, again, is searing the ginger and the onion. One of the things that I've seen in a lot of pho recipes published in the past is that they just throw the onion and the ginger into the pot. That little bit of searing or charring, it slightly cooks the aromatics and converts those sugars. It gives it a little bit of the sweet heat that is part of the foundation of a good Pho broth.

Read this article:

Evolution of pho, a modern dish born of multicultural traditions - The Splendid Table

Now that Gen 2 of Pokemon GO has been released, Eevee is no longer the star of the game. Or at least that would be true if Gen 2 didnt include two more Eevee evolutions in Espeon and Umbreon but there we have it. While more powerful Pokemon exist, and easier-to-catch Pokemon exist, theres no more pervasive Pokemon base and evolution combo thats better captured the imagination of the masses that play Pokemon GO. Part of the reason why is in the seemingly random (but not actually random) nature of Eevees evolutionary forms.

At the beginning, there was Vaporeon, and Vaporeon was good. Too good to stay the same as it was at the start. Vaporeon dominated Pokemon Gyms throughout the Pokemon GO universe to the point that its powers were slightly nerfed. Vaporeon will never be as singularly powerful as it once was but it remains one of the most powerful Pokemon in the game.

Vaporeon can be gotten with a trick ONCE per player in Pokemon GO. Users can choose to evolve a single Pokemon into Vaporeon by naming that Pokemon a certain name. If the name is spelled incorrectly or theres a space before or after the name, this trick will not work. This trick also works with Jolteon and Flareon, the electric and fire-type Pokemon that evolve from Eevee.

Sparky turns into Jolteon Rainer turns into Vaporeon Pyro turns into Flareon

Of note: a non-named Eevee evolved without ever having been used as a Buddy Pokemon will never turn into Espeon or Umbreon. Only Jolteon, Vaporeon, and Flareon can be evolved at random. Other than the first two names (shown in the next section), Espeon and Umbreon need Friendship (Buddy Friendship).

Additional names work to evolve Eevee into the other two evolutionary forms not included in Gen 1. These names work the same as the first three names, all of them coming from one Pokemon TV show or another anime for the lot. These names also require correct spelling and no spaces before or after the name before evolution.

Sakura turns into Espeon Tamao turns into Umbreon

While both Espeon and Umbreon are required to attain the entirety of the Pokedex, they do not (as yet) seem to trump the power of Vaporeon. Between the two of them, Espeon has the greatest potential. A perfect CP Umbreon can only reach 2052 while a perfect Espeon can reach a whopping 3000. Unfortunately that only counts for so much, as Espeons strengths lie in fighting bug, dark, and ghost types, which arent that common in Pokemon Gyms at the moment.

Vaporeon can reach a perfect CP of 3157, Jolteon can reach CP 2730, and Flareon believe it or not can reach 2904 CP. So while Flareon is often overlooked as a powerful Pokemon, it has large potential for placing high in a Pokemon Gym.

The original appearances of Espeon and Umbreon included a requirement of Friendship to evolve. In Pokemon GO, the equivalent of Friendship is carrying along (or walking along with) a Pokemon as a Pokemon Buddy. Through sheer force of will (and many trials and errors), the combination of Buddy Pokemon walking distance and evolution time has been uncovered.

Eevee Buddy Candy 5km per 1 Candy 5km = 3.1-miles 2x is 10km or 6.2-miles

Espeon requires that the user walk with Eevee as a Buddy Pokemon for two full cycles 6.2-miles to attain two Eevee Pokemon Candy. Once the second candy has been attained, that same Eevee should be evolved as a Buddy Pokemon. To attain Espeon, this Eevee should be evolved during the day.

The same distance and method is required to get Umbreon, save the tim of day. If this Pokemon is evolved as a buddy at night, itll instead turn into Umbreon. No naming is required to make these couple of evolutions happen. As far as weve been able to tell, this walking Buddy Pokemon trick works as many times as the user wishes to make it work, over and over again.

For more Pokemon action, have a peek at SlashGears @TeamPokemonGO Twitter portal. There lies an ever-growing trove of tips, code examinations, tips, and news of all sorts.

Read the original here:

Pokemon GO's Eevee evolution update and future news - SlashGear

Pokmon GO's Gen 2 Evolution Items Are Flat-Out Broken Forbes There's unlucky, and there's designing a system so poorly that it has the potential to break players' spirits and sap their interest in the game. For me, that's been how Pokmon GO has handled its evolution items with the release of Gen 2. I have ...

Read more from the original source:

Pokmon GO's Gen 2 Evolution Items Are Flat-Out Broken - Forbes

Mashable

Emma Watson's feminist evolution is more common than you think Mashable Emma Watson is not the first high profile feminist to demonstrate an evolved view on feminism. Far from it. Her feminist evolution is actually a pretty common and universal aspect to being a feminist. So, why are we so quick to call feminist activists ... and more »

Excerpt from:

Emma Watson's feminist evolution is more common than you think - Mashable

Dennis Kunkel Microscopy/Science Photo Library

The yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is used to make beer and bread.

Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould once pondered what would happen if the cassette tape of life were rewound and played again. Synthetic biologists have tested one aspect of this notion by engineering chromosomes from scratch, sticking them into yeast and seeing whether the modified organisms can still function normally.

They do, according to seven papers published today in Science that describe the creation, testing and refining of five redesigned yeast chromosomes17. Together with a sixth previously synthesized chromosome8, they represent more than one-third of the genome of the bakers yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. An international consortium of more than 200 researchers that created the chromosomes expects to complete a fully synthetic yeast genome by the end of the year.

The work the team has already done could help to optimize the creation of microbes to pump out alcohol, drugs, fragrances and fuel. And it serves as a guide for future research on how genomes evolve and function.

The amazing thing here is that they are figuring out how to tweak the genome not just synthesize it through a design-build-test-learn cycle, says Jack Newman, co-founder of Amyris Biotechnologies in Emeryville, California. The approach is similar to one that computer scientists might take when trying to understand a computer code written a decade ago, he adds, although the task is much harder with genomes that have undergone millions of years of evolution. Yeast originated more than 50 million years ago, when the Saccharomyces lineage branched off from other fungi.

In 2010, geneticist Craig Venter and his team revealed9the first synthetic genome, a stripped-down version of the genetic code from a bacterial parasite, Mycoplasma mycoides. Four years later, a team led by Jef Boeke, a yeast geneticist at New York University Langone Medical Center in New York City, synthesized8 a chromosome from yeast, a more complex organism that is classified as a eukaryote a group that also includes plants, worms and people.

Venters goal was to realize the smallest genome needed to sustain life, but Boeke sought to explore fundamental questions about evolution, such as whether yeasts could have evolved through alternate routes. He turned the query into a hypothesis testable with synthetic biology: how much can you change a genome and still have a working organism?

To look for an answer, Boeke assigned each of S. cerevisiaes 16 chromosomes to teams of collaborators, spread across the United States, United Kingdom, China, Singapore and Australia. Each was to create a chromosome that was stable yet evolvable, and would keep yeast functioning as usual.

The teams used computer programs to design the codes of their respective chromosomes. They omitted some sequences found in naturally occurring yeast chromosomes, such as repetitive parts of the genome, in hopes of increasing the stability of the synthetic versions. And they endowed their creations with a mechanism that mimics the random variation that drives evolution. When this scrambling system is triggered, it can shuffle, duplicate and delete genes at random.

A team led by researchers at the Pasteur Institute in Paris documented2 dramatic structural changes in the nucleus of the synthetic yeast even as it continued to thrive, making proteins and reproducing. It seems like we can really kind of torture the genome in complicated ways and frequently the yeast shrugs its shoulders and grows like normal, Boeke says.

Some teams in the consortium invented techniques to rapidly identify errors in synthetic chromosomes3, 4. Another group, led researchers at Tianjin University in China, optimized techniques to remove bugs in the genetic sequences of the chromosomes, in one instance by using the gene-editing tool CRISPRCas95.

Considering that they synthesized 536,024 base pairs in that chromosome and only used CRISPR to mess around with 45 of them is kind of refreshing, says George Church, a geneticist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It makes you feel like maybe this is the next big thing.

Genome synthesis is unlikely to displace tools such as CRISPR, which allow scientists to add or subtract a limited number of genes in an organism, he says. But it may become the favoured method for applications that require complicated genetic changes. This includes engineering yeast and other microbes to produce fragrances and other materials; manufacturers that rely on such microbes could use synthetic genomes to make those organisms more resilient to harmful viruses, for example.

If you took those [microbe] strains offline and reprogrammed their code, then put them back in, the viruses would be so far out of touch they couldnt come back, Church says. It would be like going back to the Middle Ages and giving one country hydrogen bombs.

Several groups have launched efforts to synthesize genomes from species such as the bacterium Escherichia coli and from people. Boeke is confident that his consortium will create a fully synthetic yeast genome by the years end. The team has already created several additional chromosomes, and is debugging and testing them.

The groups latest results will encourage others to dream big, Church says: Theyve been able to induce radical changes in the code, so it emboldens you to be even more radical.

Excerpt from:

Synthetic yeast chromosomes help probe mysteries of evolution ... - Nature.com