Chromosome III is the third smallest chromosome in S. cerevisiae; its size was estimated from pulsed-field gel electro- phoresis studies to be 300–360 kb
This chromosome has been the subject of intensive study, not least because it contains the three genetic loci involved in mating-type control: MAT, HML and HMR.
In March 2014, Jef Boeke of the Langone Medical Centre at New York University, published that his team has synthesized one of the S. cerevisiae 16 yeast chromosomes, the chromosome III, that he named synIII. The procedure involved replacing the genes in the original chromosome with synthetic versions and the finished synthesized chromosome was then integrated into a yeast cell. It required designing and creating 273,871 base pairs of DNA - fewer than the 316,667 pairs in the original chromosome.