Scientists hail synthetic chromosome advance

Cool and scary at the same time. Yeast 'engines' would be very efficient chemical factories. Unfortunately accidents at the chemical factory are rarely 'harmless.'

Very cool. I can't wait until the tools for building living organisms are comparable to those for programming computers.

Nature article with a lot more detail: http://www.nature.com/news/first-synthetic-yeast-chromosome-...

Modifying existing biology is probably easier than building nanotech from scratch. I'm pretty excited about the possibilities. How does someone get into this?

I'm a bit nonplussed. We already have very good tools for precisely making arbitrary changes to existing chromosomes. Creating one from scratch is a cool party trick, but it doesn't actually seem all that useful. Unless you are also proposing to design a chromosome from scratch, which nobody is.

It is extra fun that this was done by massed ranks of undergraduates working in ordinary labs, though. You could call this a sort of crowdsourced sharing economy of genomics. Or a genomic sweatshop, depending on your inclinations.

This is one step closer towards space colonization, keep it up!