Computer Aided Assembly and Verification of Synthetic Chromosomes

Synthetic biology aims at engineering biological systems, ranging from genes to entire genomes. The emerging field of synthetic genomics provides new tools to address questions and tackle challenges in biology and biotechnology impossible to address with current methods. Chromosome scale engineering requires computational tools and workflows to streamline designing, building and verifying long DNA molecules. While a systematic and generic genome design workflow does not exist, here we outline chromosome assembly and verification operations that are at the foundation of every genome scale engineering efforts.