The genome serves as the blueprint of every organism on earth. A rigorous understanding of how genomic information encodes a particular life form, and the ability to design and synthesize new genomes de novo, will drastically advance our understanding of life and improve our ability to engineer organisms. We aim to advance this goal by inventing novel concepts and developing unique methods to efficiently ‘write’ the sequences of genes, gene clusters, and genomes of living cells. Starting from a single nucleotide and continuing through to entire genomes, the Wang lab is working to fill in the gaps with novel technologies to turn biology into a predicative engineering material.