Synthetic genomics: a new venture to dissect genome fundamentals and engineer new functions

Since the first synthetic gene was synthesized in 1970s, the efficiency and the capacity of made-to-order DNA sequence synthesis has increased by several orders of magnitude. Advances in DNA synthesis and assembly over the past years has resulted in a steep drop in price for custom made DNA. Similar effects were observed in DNA sequencing technologies which underpin DNA-reading projects. Today, synthetic DNA sequences with more than 10 000 bps and turn-around times of a few weeks are commercially available. This enables researchers to perform large-scale projects to write synthetic chromosomes and characterize their functionalities in vivo. Synthetic genomics opens up new paradigms to study the genome fundamentals and engineer novel biological functions.