The assembly of DNA is currently limited by the presence of random sequence errors in synthetic oligonucleotides that arise from side reactions during synthesis (incomplete couplings, misincorporations, etc.) and resulting in 1-3 errors/kb (7, 12, 13) . The deleterious impact of these errors becomes more significant as the desired lengths of synthetic DNA increase. Indeed, in the remarkable assembly of the PhiX 174 bacteriophage genome (5386 bp) using gel-purified, synthetic oligonucleotides, the products contained an average of $2 lethal errors/kb resulting in 1 plaque-forming genomes per 20 000 clones (7) . A functional selection (plaque formation) was required in this study to identify a clone with the correct sequence. Thus, error reduction/correction is a requirement for the efficient production of long synthetic DNA of defined sequence. However, the process of sequencing multiple clones and manual correction of errors is both costly and time consuming.