From the artificial genome of the baker's yeast to synthetic systems design

To date, the rational design and construction of the synthetic biological systems is time-consuming and primarily depends on the domain expertise. It is error prone and does not scale to large systems with hundreds or thousands of genes. Recent advances in the Yeast 2.0 project might lead to significant improvements in this area.

The synthetic yeast project aims at building from the bottom up a new version of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae genome, called Sc2.0, by removing all known transposons and retaining only the essential genes. This minimal genome evolution can be controlled by the build-in SCRaMbLE system (Synthetic Chromosome Rearrangement and Modification by LoxP-mediated Evolution). Thanks to this mechanism, it is possible to correlate phenotype and genotype information, which can lead to the development of new design strategies for complex synthetic systems. In this talk, I will describe a dual evolution strategy that combines in silico evolution of synthetic biology designs with the in vivo evolution of the engineered microorganisms.