A team of researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute has created the largest man-made DNA structure by synthesizing and assembling the 582,970 base pair genome of Mycoplasma genitalium. This work, published in the journal Science (Gibson, et al, 2008) is the second of three key steps toward the goal of creating a fully synthetic organism. In the next step the team will attempt to create a living bacterial cell based entirely on the synthetically made genome.

Reference: Gibson et al (2008). Complete Chemical Synthesis, Assembly, and Cloning of a Mycoplasma genitalium Genome. Science [DOI: 10.1126/science.1151721]