Abstract
What a living organism looks like and how it works and what are its
components-all this is encoded on DNA, the genetic blueprint.
Consequently, the way to change an organism is to change its genetic
information. Since the first pieces of recombinant DNA have been used to
transform cells in the 1970s, this approach has been enormously
extended. Bigger and bigger parts of the genetic information have been
exchanged or added over the years. Now we are at a point where the
construction of entire chromosomes becomes a reachable goal and first
examples appear. This development leads to fundamental new questions,
for example, about what is possible and desirable to build or what
construction rules one needs to follow when building synthetic
chromosomes. Here we review the recent progress in the field, discuss
current challenges and speculate on the appearance of future synthetic
chromosomes.
