https://pages.htgaa.org/2026a/fiona-connolly/homework/week-12-bioproduction/index.htmlWeek 12 — Building Genomes How to rewrite an organism, one chromosome at a time At a glance. Synthetic biology spent its first two decades learning to read DNA. This week is about writing it — not gene by gene, but genome by genome. We’ll meet the smallest free-living cell ever built (473 genes, and we still don’t know what 149 of them do), the E. coli strain whose entire genetic code was rewritten by hand, the yeast whose chromosomes are being replaced one at a time, and the CRISPR tricks that let you dial metabolic pathways like an audio mixer. The final two sections bring the toolkit home to my own work: the MS2 phage L-protein group project (where the whole 3.5 kb genome is small enough to redesign from scratch) and the Cholera Shield final project (where genome-scale tools become the obvious answer to B. subtilis protease degradation, biocontainment, and multi-function spore-display optimization). This is the chapter where synthetic biology stops asking “can we edit this?” and starts asking “what if we just typed the whole thing from scratch?”Hugoen