Underlying every living cell, there is a beautifully concerted circuitry of signalling, metabolism and regulation that, together, orchestrate a variety of functions. Synthetic biology has targeted this circuitry at all levels, engineering it towards a wide array of applications – but also expanding our understanding fundamental aspects of the cell. Fuelled by advances in DNA sequencing, synthesis, editing, and computational modelling and circuit design, synthetic biology has broken tremendous ground in the last decade all across the world