Scientists have created from scratch a yeast chromosome and the method behind it could be revolutionary for the customization of fuels and pharmaceuticals.

Study leader Jef Boeke, a researcher at NYU Langone Medical Center, told NBC News this research will be important for an eventual move away from petroleum and toward biofuels.

"We think this is going to be critical as we transition as a species from a petroleum economy to a bio-economy," he said.

The researchers' work was published Thursday in the journal Science.

"This work represents the biggest step yet in an international effort to construct the full genome of synthetic yeast," Boeke said in a press release. "It is the most extensively altered chromosome ever built. But the milestone that really counts is integrating it into a living yeast cell.

"We have shown that yeast cells carrying this synthetic chromosome are remarkably normal. They behave almost identically to wild yeast cells, only they now possess new capabilities and can do things that wild yeast cannot."

Boeke said this technique could even be adapted to work with a human genome to develop medical screenings.

"This is significant as an example of synthetic genomes aimed well beyond making mere copies of chromosomes," George Church, a Harvard geneticist who was not involved in the study, told NBC News. Boeke's study represents a trend that is "making significant functional changes - ideally, changes useful for biotech productivity and safety."

Yeast has about 6,000 genes, about one-third of the ones it has total, in common with humans. In the study, the researchers were able to manipulate these genes and the yeast's DNA without losing anything important.

"We can pull together any group of cards, shuffle the order and make millions and millions of different decks, all in one small tube of yeast," Boeke said in the release. "Now that we can shuffle the genomic deck, it will allow us to ask, can we make a deck of cards with a better hand for making yeast survive under any of a multitude of conditions, such as tolerating higher alcohol levels."