Microorganisms are a promising means to address many societal sustainability challenges
owing to their ability to thrive in diverse environments and interface with the microscale …

Technologies to profoundly engineer biology are becoming increasingly affordable,
powerful, and accessible to a widening group of actors. While offering tremendous potential …

Engineering the genetic code of an organism has been proposed to provide a firewall from
natural ecosystems by preventing viral infections and gene transfer,,,,–. However, numerous …

Whole-genome synthesis provides a powerful approach for understanding and expanding
organism function,–. To build large genomes rapidly, scalably and in parallel, we need (1) …

Rapid advances in DNA synthesis techniques have enabled the assembly and engineering
of viral and microbial genomes, presenting new opportunities for synthetic genomics in …

Synthetic auxotrophy in which cell viability depends on the presence of an unnatural amino
acid (unAA) provides a powerful strategy to restrict unwanted propagation of genetically …

Background Genome simplification is an important topic in the field of life sciences that has
attracted attention from its conception to the present day. It can help uncover the essential …

Synthetic genomics seeks to design and construct entire genomes to mechanistically dissect
fundamental questions of genome function and to engineer organisms for diverse …

Advances in systems and synthetic biology have propelled the construction of reduced
bacterial genomes. Genome reduction was initially focused on exploring properties of …

The standard genetic code defines the rules of translation for nearly every life form on Earth.
It also determines the amino acid changes accessible via single-nucleotide mutations, thus …