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UK scientists to synthesise human genome to learn more about how DNA works

Five-year SynHG project aims to pave way for next generation of medical therapies and treatment of diseases

Researchers are embarking on an ambitious project to construct human genetic material from scratch to learn more about how DNA works and pave the way for the next generation of medical therapies.

Scientists on the Synthetic Human Genome (SynHG) project will spend the next five years developing the tools and knowhow to build long sections of human genetic code in the lab. These will be inserted into living cells to understand how the code operates.

Armed with the insights, scientists hope to devise radical new therapies for the treatment of diseases. Among the possibilities are living cells that are resistant to immune attack or particular viruses, which could be transplanted into patients with autoimmune diseases or with liver damage from chronic viral infections.

“The information gained from synthesising human genomes may be directly useful in generating treatments for almost any disease,” said Prof Jason Chin, who is leading the project at the MRC’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge.

Scientists have been able to read DNA for decades. The first draft of the human genome was announced 25 years ago, a feat that set the stage for the ongoing genetics revolution. But while the technology for reading genomes has progressed rapidly, writing them has proved more difficult.

For the SynHG project, researchers will start by making sections of a human chromosome and testing them in human skin cells. The project involves teams from the universities of Cambridge, Kent, Manchester, Oxford and Imperial College London.

Chin’s team recently synthesised the complete genome of the E coli bacterium. But while the bug’s genome carries about 4.5m base pairs, represented by the letters G, T, C and A, the human genome holds more than 3bn base pairs.

“If you think about the human genome, it’s more than just a set of genes on a string,” said Dr Julian Sale, a group leader at the LMB. “There’s an awful lot of the genome, sometimes called the dark matter of the genome, that we don’t know what it does. The idea is that if you can build genomes successfully, you can fully understand them.”