Yeast with human genes
Geneticists have successfully inserted hundreds of human genes into the DNA of the fungus
"All living cells on Earth use a large number of common components, which, as it turned out, even after billions of years of independent evolution, can be swapped without problems. This discovery, the replacement of yeast genes with human DNA, is a great demonstration that all life on Earth comes from the same source," said Edward Marcotte from the University of Texas at Austin (in a press release Partly Human Yeast Show A Common Ancestor's Lasting Legacy - VM).
Marcotte and his colleagues were able to "humanize" mushrooms during an extremely long and painstaking study of the genome structure of ordinary baking yeast, in which scientists searched for the most ancient and little-changed genes since the separation of the ancestors of animals and fungi.
According to scientists, the yeast genome contains about four hundred genes that are critically important for their vital activity and have hardly changed over hundreds of millions of years of separate evolution of animals and fungi. Marcotte and his colleagues replaced each of these genes with a human version and observed whether the fungus survives after such an "operation".
To the great surprise of biologists, almost half of such replacements were crowned with complete success – 176 human genes out of 414 turned out to be fully compatible with the yeast genome and workable inside the fungus cell.
Such a successful transplant made scientists think about what influences the success of such replacements. After analyzing the structure of the replaced yeast genes and their human counterparts, scientists came to a rather unexpected conclusion.
It turned out that compatibility largely depended not on how few or many differences in structure there were between genes, but on which "module", a set of genes performing one major task, they were included in. If the human and fungal genes were part of the same module, then they could most likely be swapped, and vice versa.
Marcotte estimates that, in total, the human and yeast genomes contain about a thousand such interchangeable genes. As he believes, their mass transplantation into the genome of fungi will help to create laboratory organisms on which doctors will be able to test new drugs and find out which mutations in our genes can lead to the development of hereditary diseases.
In the near future, according to the authors of the article, they will take the first step towards solving this problem by trying to transplant about three dozen genes into yeast DNA at once.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru22.05.2015