Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 105, 20404–20409 (2008)

Edging their way towards the construction of a synthetic organism, Daniel Gibson at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, and his colleagues have performed a one-step assembly of an entire bacterial genome inside yeast.

In early 2008, the team reported that they had manufactured the 592-kilobase genome of Mycoplasma genitalium using several steps to sew together chemically synthesized DNA fragments (D. G. Gibson et al. Science 319, 1215–1220; 2008). In the new simplified version, they show that yeast can take up 25 DNA fragments and splice them together correctly on its own. The technique could make it easier to assemble 'designer' genomes.