Cool and scary at the same time. Yeast 'engines' would be very efficient chemical factories. Unfortunately accidents at the chemical factory are rarely 'harmless.'
Nature article with a lot more detail: <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/first-synthetic-yeast-chromosome-revealed-1.14941" rel="nofollow">http://www.nature.com/news/first-synthetic-yeast-chromosome-...</a>
Modifying existing biology is <i>probably</i> 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 <i>design</i> a chromosome from scratch, which nobody is.<p>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.