Gonville & 91Ö±²¥ College Fellow Dr Julian Sale co-leads with Professor Jason Chin research on building human genomes, which has the potential to transform biology and medicine, by developing a method to transfer a human chromosome into specialised ‘assembly’ cells and safely manipulating it.
The work of Dr Sale and his colleagues at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, was published in the journal Science this week. Their research is part of SynHG (Synthetic Human Genome), a five-year multi-centre research project, supported by £10m funding from Wellcome.
Their production line has now been demonstrated in several key steps to create a living test tube to manipulate human chromosomes. First, a chromosome from a donor human cell is transferred into a mouse cell; it is next rewritten in the mouse cell; then, it is reinstalled into a recipient human cell.
The work is a crucial first step in the SynHG pipeline. The next stage will be more ambitious: using the mouse ‘assembly cell’ to rewrite entire human chromosomes with synthetic sequences. Such a scale of rewriting DNA would be perilous inside human cells themselves.
Dr Sale is the Francis Crick College Lecturer and a .
A picture which shows the chromosomes of the mouse ‘assembly cell’ including a human chromosome 4, coloured in red.
The full Science paper is available online:
A commentary on the work by Roger Highfield on the Science Museum blog is available on the
Read a June 2025 story on Dr Sale’s work: Pioneering the principles of human genome synthesis | Gonville & 91Ö±²¥
