The journal is particularly interested in studies on the design and synthesis of new genetic circuits and gene products; computational methods in the design of systems; and integrative applied approaches to understanding disease and metabolism.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

Design and optimization of genetic systems

Genetic circuit design and their principles for their organization into programs

Computational methods to aid the design of genetic systems

Experimental methods to quantify genetic parts, circuits, and metabolic fluxes

Genetic parts libraries: their creation, analysis, and ontological representation

Protein engineering including computational design

Metabolic engineering and cellular manufacturing, including biomass conversion

Natural product access, engineering, and production

Creative and innovative applications of cellular programming

Medical applications, tissue engineering, and the programming of therapeutic cells

Minimal cell design and construction

Genomics and genome replacement strategies

Viral engineering

Automated and robotic assembly platforms for synthetic biology

DNA synthesis methodologies

Metagenomics and synthetic metagenomic analysis

Bioinformatics applied to gene discovery, chemoinformatics, and pathway construction

Gene optimization

Methods for genome-scale measurements of transcription and metabolomics

Systems biology and methods to integrate multiple data sources

in vitro and cell-free synthetic biology and molecular programming

Nucleic acid engineering.