Cromosoma sintético (y II)

Cuando leo en un  periódico nacional esto:

“LA VIDA artificial ya está a la vuelta de la esquina. El equipo encabezado por Jef Boeke ha logrado el primer cromosoma sintético, idéntico al de las plantas y los animales. Ello abre la puerta a crear en el laboratorio seres vivos -y tal vez inteligentes- a partir de células fabricadas por los científicos”, casi se me cae un ojo. 
Para saber de qué va realmente, aquí dejo el abstract oficial de Science:

Rapid advances in DNA synthesis techniques have made it possible to engineer viruses, biochemical pathways and assemble bacterial genomes. Here, we report the synthesis of a functional 272,871–base pair designer eukaryotic chromosome, synIII, which is based on the 316,617–base pair native Saccharomyces cerevisiae chromosome III. Changes to synIII include TAG/TAA stop-codon replacements, deletion of subtelomeric regions, introns, transfer RNAs, transposons, and silent mating loci as well as insertion of loxPsym sites to enable genome scrambling. SynIII is functional in S. cerevisiae. Scrambling of the chromosome in a heterozygous diploid reveals a large increase in a-mater derivatives resulting from loss of the MATα allele on synIII. The complete design and synthesis of synIII establishes S. cerevisiae as the basis for designer eukaryotic genome biology.