Synthetic genome restarts: £10M for 2% of DNA
The 2016 synthetic genome project stayed a collection of pilots and meetings; British SynHG now has £10 million from Wellcome for chromosome synthesis tools, and Pinglay proposes the minimal human genome as the new goal.
In 2016, a project launched with the goal of building a human genome from synthetic DNA. The organizers promised to cut genome engineering costs by 1,000x within ten years and build a virus-resistant "ultra-safe" cell line. On June 3, synthetic biologist Sudarshan Pinglay argued in Nature World View that the work should restart with a different goal. He describes the outcome plainly: the project stayed "a collection of pilots and meetings." The long-DNA assembly technology and the funding could not support the scale of the task.
The British project SynHG received £10 million from Wellcome in 2025 for five years. Jason Chin leads it from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Ellison Institute of Technology Oxford, and the University of Oxford. Cambridge, Kent, Manchester, Oxford, and Imperial College London are also in the consortium. The five-year goal: build the tools for synthesizing human chromosomes. According to SynHG's website, the proof-of-concept synthetic chromosome will cover about 2% of all DNA.
Pinglay proposes a different task: defining the minimal genome, the smallest set of genetic elements that still lets a human cell live and divide. The human genome has roughly three billion DNA letters; only about 2% code for proteins. The rest controls chromosome folding, gene switching, cell division, and processes whose map remains incomplete.
Even in bacteria, this problem proved hard. JCVI-syn3A, a minimal bacterial cell model with 493 genes, needed about six days of simulation to cover one 105-minute cell cycle. A human cell is orders of magnitude more complex, so the minimal genome will have to be found through real assembly and validation in living cells. AI models are learning to predict how DNA changes affect a cell, but they cannot replace the experiment.
Wellcome says synthesizing a full human genome will take decades. The current five-year grant funds the tooling. A virus-resistant cell would require rewriting thousands of DNA sites; Pinglay proposes concentrating on the minimal genome instead.
On Eternal Search, we track the organization Experiment.
This work is still far from therapy, rejuvenation, or designing humans, but the approach is taking shape: replacing a large DNA module in a cell and checking which parts are truly necessary for life.
Pinglay's Nature piece proposes restarting synthetic human genome work with a scope change after the original 2016 HGP-write goals went unmet. The Experiment organization page on Eternal Search gives readers a concrete anchor for exploring biology and genetics funding at the project level, grounding the headline institutional grant in the broader landscape of what is available to researchers in this area.