Thank you, George for the quick response. I will mention Biologos in my presentation.
By the way I just spotted the article at
The Minimal Genome Project: "Here we report a new cell" which discusses a significant step in the direction I’m thinking about. However the abstract of the paper at http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6280/aad6253 says, “Whole genomes can now be built from chemically synthesized oligonucleotides and brought to life by installation into a receptive cellular environment.” That sounds like implanting the synthetic genome into an existing cell rather than building a complete cell structure from amino acids, sugars, etc.