Buries the caveats a little at the end of the second paragraph: "They have yet to reassemble those pieces into a functioning E. coli." What they actually did w

Buries the caveats a little at the end of the second paragraph: "They have yet to reassemble those pieces into a functioning E. coli." What they actually did was make copies of the genes in E. Coli, completely remove 7/64 of the codons in those genes, replacing them with synonymous codons, then checked to see that the genes still worked. I imagine they did this by putting them into E. Coli that were missing those genes and seeing if the bacteria could survive using the new gene, but I don't have the full text so I don't know for sure. In other words if the genome were a book, they replaced all the instances of the letter "y" with "i" and found that the book was still understandable. It's remarkably hard to do this simple modification, but it's still a ways from completely rewriting a genome. That said, it's a very important first step and hopefully the process of stitching all these things together will be relatively pain free.