Prof. DAI Junbiao from Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology under Chinese Academy of Sciences paid a visit to IHB on September 9, 2019.  

Prof. DAI Junbiao from Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology under Chinese Academy of Sciences paid a visit to Institute of Hydrobiology (IHB) of Chinese Academy of Sciences on September 9, 2019. He gave a presentation with the title of “Decode and reprogram the yeast genome” for IHB researchers. 

In his presentation, Prof. Dai firstly introduced the term synthetic biology and the background and progress of the Synthetic Yeast Genome Project (Sc 2.0 Project). He highlighted the completion of artificial design and synthesis of chromosome 12 of Saccharomyces cerevisiae by his team.  

The full length of the 12th chromosome of artificial Saccharomyces cerevisiae is about 0.97M bases. His team designed new base sequences based on the original sequence, and finally obtained the synthesis of chromosome 12 (synXII) which is normally function in Saccharomyces cerevisiae through the self-developed layered assembly and subsequent transformation scheme.  

During the synthesis of yeast chromosome, his team also answered some important issues in the basic biology of eukaryotes while exploring the application prospects of yeast synthetic biology through a series of work on yeast chromosome modification and simplification.  

He also discussed the prospect of the development of “Sc 3.0”. 

Prof. Dai’s research interests lie in synthetic biology using different model organisms, focusing on development of new technologies for genes synthesis, assembly and synthetic genomics. He’s one of the key members in synthetic yeast consortium (Sc2.0) and has finished the synthesis of the largest yeast chromosome XII. He is the winner of Albert Lehninger Research Award from Johns Hopkins University.