It's cool watching Dr. Adamala and Dr. John Glass of JCVI kind of working their way towards each other, like the two sides of the first intercontinental railway aiming to meet up. Glass is head of the minimal genome project at Venter Institute, stripping more and more genes out of a certain bacteria and keeping only the ones it needs to stay alive. More info here: https://www.jcvi.org/research/synthetic-biology