Chromosome one, top left.

So this is a single chromosome.

The chromosome is literally blown apart.

This huge package of DNA is called a chromosome.

And you have two strands of DNA in each chromosome.

But what's even more amazing is that if you look at the Y chromosome side, the male side of the story, the Y chromosome Adam only lived around 60,000 years ago.

When the cell feels it's ready to go, it rips apart the chromosome.

But for a son, he can only get the X chromosome from his mother.

It's able to feel when the cell is ready, when the chromosome is correctly positioned.

Carole Lartigue led the effort to actually transplant a bacterial chromosome from one bacteria to another.

And Dan led the team for the synthesis of this over one million base pair chromosome.

Because of the problems with Mycoplasma genitalium and its slow growth about a year and a half ago, we decided to synthesize the much larger chromosome, the mycoides chromosome, knowing that we had the biology worked out on that for transplantation.

This was an African man who gave rise to all the Y chromosome diversity around the world.

It's on the X chromosome. And so in this way you can only get it from your mother.

The Y chromosome, the piece of DNA that makes men men, traces a purely paternal line of descent.

We start with these fragments, and then we have a homologous recombination system that reassembles those into a chromosome.

And what you can do now is, you can outlay exactly what your chromosome is, and what the gene code on that chromosome is right here, and what those genes code for, and what animals they code against, and then you can tie it to the literature.

And the first chromosome we built in 2008 the 500,000 base pair one we simply assigned the names of the authors of the chromosome into the genetic code, but it was using just amino acid single letter translations, which leaves out certain letters of the alphabet.

And if we isolate just one chromosome, we're going to pull it out and have a look at its structure.

So what we found is if we took the chromosome out of yeast and methylated it, we could then transplant it.

We're here today to announce the first synthetic cell, a cell made by starting with the digital code in the computer, building the chromosome from four bottles of chemicals, assembling that chromosome in yeast, transplanting it into a recipient bacterial cell and transforming that cell into a new bacterial species.

So we took the same mycoides genome that Carole had initially transplanted, and we grew that in yeast as an artificial chromosome.

Women have two copies of that big X chromosome men have the X and, of course, that small copy of the Y.

When we did these experiments, though, we could get the chromosome out of yeast but it wouldn't transplant and boot up a cell.

So we're now making several dozen different constructs, because we can vary the cassettes and the genes that go into this artificial chromosome.

There are exciting new forms of gene therapy that overcome the problem of placing the genetic material in the right place on the chromosome.

I've wanted to ask Craig Venter if it would be possible to insert a synthetic chromosome into a human so that we could reiterate ourselves if we wanted to.

The only way to prove these ideas was to construct an artificial chromosome with those genes in them, and we had to do this in a cassette based fashion.

Now in the nature area, we look at whether or not we are innately equipped with something, perhaps in our brains, some abnormal chromosome that causes this muse like effect.

Genetic screening and counselling should also be included in the programme a high number of chromosome pathologies are being registered among the exposed population and risks continue among their offspring.

In 2008, we reported the complete synthesis of the Mycoplasma genitalium genome, a little over 500,000 letters of genetic code, but we have not yet succeeded in booting up that chromosome.

Every cell in your body (except mature red blood cells) there are about 50 trillion in an adult contains copies of your DNA, which are coiled up tightly to form 46 separate bundles called chromosomes. These chromosomes are stored in the core of the cell (nucleus), and there are 22 matching pairs, one of each pair from each of your biological parents, plus an X chromosome from your mother and either an X or Y chromosome from your father

So in addition to doing the transplant, we had to find out how to get a bacterial chromosome out of the eukaryotic yeast into a form where we could transplant it into a recipient cell.

So, we thought the worst problem would be a single molecule contamination of the native chromosome, leading us to believe that we actually had created a synthetic cell, when it would have been just a contaminant.

So last fall when we published the results of that work in Science, we all became overconfident and were sure we were only a few weeks away from being able to now boot up a chromosome out of yeast.

These were followed by congenital malformations, deformations, and chromosome aberrations, (index 9,8 ), and in the third place were the diseases of the circulatory system and the symptoms, signs, and abnormal clinical test results with the same structure index of 6,1 .

Every cell in your body (except mature red blood cells) there are about 50 trillion in an adult contains copies of your DNA, which are coiled up tightly to form 46 separate bundles called chromosomes. These chromosomes are stored in the core of the cell (nucleus), and there are 22 matching pairs, one of each pair from each of your biological parents, plus an X chromosome from your mother and either an X or Y chromosome from your father XX makes you a girl and XY a boy.

We decided early on that we had to take a synthetic route, even though nobody had been there before, to see if we could synthesize a bacterial chromosome so we could actually vary the gene content to understand the essential genes for life.

So once we realized that we could make 5,000 base pair viral sized pieces, we thought, we at least have the means then to try and make serially lots of these pieces to be able to eventually assemble them together to make this mega base chromosome.