Reacción a "Reactions: Yeast with over half of its genome synthetic developed for the first time"

The work is extraordinary, I would say titanic, because of the infinite number of technical problems, foreseen and unforeseen, that they have had to solve. To synthesise functional chromosomes is an extraordinarily complex task with the biology we know today. The biggest immediate benefit, in my opinion, is learning about the fundamentals of how complex genomes work. 

There are bacteria and viruses with synthetic genomes, but this is the first approach to the synthetic genome of a eukaryotic cell, with the breakthrough of getting half of its artificial chromosomes. This is a milestone and the next steps may be even more difficult. Genomic alterations have been tested that may be useful for future chromosome engineering. A chromosome (a 'neochromosome') has even been synthesised that contains all the transfer RNAs (essential for decoding the genetic code and synthesising proteins) together, something that does not exist in nature and which demonstrates that genes can be drastically relocated without significantly affecting their function. 

One of the limitations is our ignorance and the fact that some problems have to be solved as they arise, without being able to anticipate them. It is almost an artisanal task. Although the current hurdles have been overcome, as evidenced by the fact that cells function well with half of the synthetic chromosomes, what remains to be done may be much more complicated, not least because there is a significant fraction of yeast genes whose function is completely unknown. This will require an enormous additional effort to arrive at a complete artificial genome.