Escherichia coli with two linear chromosomes

A number of attempts have been made to simplify the synthesis of whole chromosomes to generate artificial microorganisms. However, the sheer size of the average bacterial genome makes the task virtually impracticable. A major limitation is the maximum assembly DNA size imposed by the current available technologies. We propose to fragment the bacterial chromosome into autonomous replicating units so that (i) each episome becomes small enough to be assembled in its entirety within an assembly host and (ii) the complete episome set should be able to generate a viable cell. In this work, we used the telN/tos system of bacteriophage N1 to show that the circular genome of Escherichia coli can be split into two linear chromosomes that complement each other to produce viable cells.