Synthetic chromosomes.

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. © FEMS 2015. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.