Organizing genome engineering for the gigabase scale

Just out in Nature Communications, our new paper on "Organizing Genome Engineering for the Gigabase Scale"!

This perspective piece, a companion to the technology perspective last fall, analyzes the trends in the growing size of organisms getting their genomes re-engineered, and concludes that, while impressive, it's growing more slowly than one might think: big, complex organisms like mammals and plants are only likely to become tractable around 2050. Moreover, the complexity of the projects has been growing exponentially as well, as measured by the number of authors per paper.

The largest engineered genomes have grown exponentially, doubling approximately every 3 years (a), but the number of authors credited on projetcs has been growing exponentially as well (b). 

We look at this problem and see not just a genome technology issue, but a massive organizational challenge as well: these projects are going to be big, and in order to manage them effectively we're going to need a lot of friction-reducing software tooling automation.  The bulk of the piece is then dedicated to looking at the design/build/test cycle and analyzing the sticking points and how to address them.

Bottom line: it's not going to be simple, but it looks quite tractable, and there are things that can be done right now that will likely have a significant impact on our ability to engineer ever-larger genomes.