Enabling technologies in synthetic biology--DNA synthesis, assembly and editing

Abstract

Synthetic biology is an emerging discipline, which aims at creating artificial lives or remolding the present organisms to generate new features. To achieve these goals, synthetic biologists need to design and synthesize new genes, pathways, modules or even whole genomes. As these enabling technologies (e.g. gene synthesis, DNA assembly and genome editing) are very important for the progress of synthetic biology, we will focus on the development of these technologies in this review.