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Synthetic virology"Synthetic Virology is the scientific discipline engaged in the study and engineering of synthetic, man-made Viruses.""It is a multidisciplinary research field, at the crossroad of Virology, Synthetic Biology, Computational Biology, and DNA Nanotechnology from which it borrows and integrates its concepts and methodologies. There are a wide range of applications for synthetic viral technology such as medical treatments, investigative tools, and reviving organisms [1]."Constructing De novo Synthetic Viruses"Advancements in genome sequencing technology [2] and oligonucleotide synthesis paved the way for construction of synthetic genomes based on previously sequenced genomes. Both RNA or DNA viruses can be made using existing methods. RNA viruses have historically been utilized due to the typically small genome size and existing reverse transcription machinery present [3]. The first man-made infectious viruses generated without any natural template were of the Polio virus and the φX174 bacteriophage. With synthetic live viruses, it is not the whole viruses that are synthesized, but rather their genome at first, both in the case of DNA and RNA viruses. For many viruses, viral RNA is infectious when introduced into a cell (during infection or after reverse transcription.) These organisms are able to sustain an infectious life cycle upon introduction in vivo."Applications for Synthetic Virology"This technology is now being used to investigate novel vaccine strategies [4]. The ability to synthesize viruses has far-reaching consequences, since viruses can no longer be regarded as extinct, as long as the information of their genome sequence is known and permissive cells are available. As of March 2014, the full-length genome sequences of 3843 different viruses, including smallpox, are publicly available in an online database maintained by the National Institutes of Health.""Synthetic viruses have been researched as potential gene therapy tools as well [5]."References


 * 1) http://science.sciencemag.org/content/297/5583/1016
 * 2) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ygeno.2015.11.003
 * 3) https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470015902.a0027771
 * 4) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2819212/
 * 5) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4227300/