Smithsonian Magazine (March 27) -- An international team of researchers has built a yeast chromosome and integrated it into a living yeast cell. Their work marks a significant advance in the field of synthetic biology – and a cautious step toward the ability to create designer genomes for plants and animals. “This work reports the first designer eukaryotic chromosome that has been synthesized from scratch, which is an important step toward the construction of a designer eukaryotic genome,” says Huimin Zhao, a professor of biomolecular engineering at Illinois.