To test whether these shared genes are still interchangeable, a team of scientists led by Edward Marcotte, a professor of molecular bioscience at the University of Texas at Austin, ‘humanized’ yeast genes — that is, they took human genes and put them into yeast cells. The results were published recently in the journal Science.
The researchers tested 400 genes that are “absolutely critical for the life of a cell,” Marcotte says. “They’re involved in the basic operations of the cell, like copying the DNA and dividing the cell and building important structures in the cell.”
The test involved turning off the yeast genes one at a time and and replacing them with DNA from the matched human gene to see if the yeast cells could live using the human DNA instead of their own. The gene swap worked for about half of the genes they tested, Marcotte says.
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