Correction to: Nature Reviews Chemistry https://doi.org/10.1038/s41570-022-00456-9. Published online 23 January 2023.

In the version of this article initially published, in the first and third sentences of the “Barriers to entry for customers” subsection, the unit scale in the prices for DNA synthesis (now reading “US$300–1,000 per 3 kb gene or $0.1–0.3 b−1”; “$0.01 b−1”; and “$0.07 b−1”) were incorrectly listed as “kb−1”. The errors have been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.