Programming biological operating systems: genome design, assembly and activation

This Perspective takes the reader through the important steps in bacterial genome assembly and activation and concludes with an outlook on how customized genomes may be achieved. The DNA technologies developed over the past 20 years for reading and writing the genetic code converged when the first synthetic cell was created 4 years ago. An outcome of this work has been an extraordinary set of tools for synthesizing, assembling, engineering and transplanting whole bacterial genomes. Technical progress, options and applications for bacterial genome design, assembly and activation are discussed.