Scientists have created a new way of speeding up the genome evolution of baker’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the same yeast we use for bread and beer production.
This is to develop a synthetic yeast strain that can be transformed on demand, making it particularly attractive for industrial biotechnology applications, such as the mass production of advanced medicines to treat illnesses such as Malaria and Tuberculosis (TB). It could also have massive implications for the future study of DNA.
Led by Professor Patrick Cai at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, in collaboration with Prof. Junbiao Dai from the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, two back-to-back papers are being published in Nature Communications on May 22nd, 2018.
