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.
合成生物学作为一门新兴学科，其目标主要有两点：一是利用非天然的分子使其出现生命的现象，也就是“人造生命”；二是“改造生命”，比如利用一种生命体的元件 (或经过人工改造)，组装到另一个生命体中，使其产生特定功能。无论是哪种目的，对生命遗传物质DNA 的操作都非常关键，其具体包括DNA 的从头合成、组装和编辑等。同时，这些使能技术的进步也促进了合成生物学其他领域的发展。本文介绍了DNA 操作相关的合成生物学使能技术的最新进展。.
Keywords: DNA assembly; enabling technology; gene synthesis; genome editing; synthetic biology.