BME Graduate students Pasha Hadidi of the Athanasiou Lab and Yu (Charlie) Ouyang of the Cherry Lab co-authors on a recently published Science paper “Total Synthesis of a Functional Designer Eukaryotic Chromosome” describing the world’s first synthetic eukaryotic chromosome. As undergraduate students at the Johns Hopkins University in 2008, Hadidi and Ouyang, along with their fellow classmates, performed synthesis, cloning, and sequence analysis of DNA as part of a multidisciplinary team lead by Dr. Jef D. Boeke. The paper is receiving attention from CNN, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, io9, Scientific American, Salon, and many other important media outlets.