Those genes remain, in part, from the last common ancestor of humans and yeast.
“Cells use a common set of parts and those parts, even after a billion years of independent evolution, are swappable,” Edward Marcotte, a professor at The University of Texas at Austin, said in a press release.
“It’s a beautiful demonstration of the common heritage of all living things — to be able to take DNA from a human and replace the matching DNA in a yeast cell and have it successfully support the life of the cell.”
That’s just what Marcotte and his colleagues did, as they describe in their study published in the journal Science. Although yeast (such as the Baker’s yeast that might be in your refrigerator now) consists of a single cell and humans have trillions of cells organized into complex systems, multiple genes are shared between the two.
Of those, about 450 are critical for yeast’s survival, so the researchers removed the yeast version of each one and replaced it with the human version and waited to see whether the yeast would die.
They wound up creating hundreds of new strains of yeast, each with a single human gene. About half of these resulted in an organism that could survive and reproduce.
While this might sound like an eerie Frankenstein-like experiment, the goal is to produce a new way of researching human genetic diseases caused by mutations.
It’s actually cutting edge research, since the technique could help to reduce or even eliminate testing on live animals.
Another benefit is that the testing could lead to treatments designed for a particular individual. For example, researchers might insert precise versions of a human gene mutation into yeast and then expose the yeast to different drugs to test new therapies. As a result, the treatments could be tailored to a person’s precise genetic mutation.
Read more at Discovery News
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