Researchers at Penn led by Ben Black, PhD, the Eldridge Reeves Johnson Foundation Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics in Penn Medicine, have found a new way to create human artificial chromosomes (HACs), which can carry large amounts of human DNA into cells. Earlier methods to synthesize HACs relied on linking shorter DNA constructs into a larger chromosome within the cell in a process called multimerization. However, the genetic fragments tended to connect in unpredictable sequences of varying lengths, making it difficult to anticipate how the genes would behave. The Penn team addressed this problem by synthesizing larger strands of DNA so that HACs could be formed from a single construct, removing the need for multimerization. The new method allows HACs to be crafted more quickly and precisely, which, in turn, will directly speed up the rate at which DNA research can be done. This breakthrough could lead to improved gene therapies and better models for studying human diseases. Read the full story here and here.