As an emerging, interdisciplinary field, synthetic biology has made great advances in many directions due to wide acceptance of its core principles and rapid progress in DNA synthesis. In this paper, recent development in gene circuits, genome design and synthesis, cell factories, and synthetic microbial consortia is reviewed. The complexity of artificial gene circuits that can be designed and constructed is gradually increasing with more refined control. Synthetic genomes are routinely assembled, expanding from prokaryotes (Mycoplasma to Escherichia coli) to eukaryotes (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), and improved capacity in genome design promotes the research of biological evolution. Metabolic pathways of ever-increasing lengths are constructed based on modularization and orthogonality principles to produce molecules of complex structures, and fundamental rewiring of cellular metabolism is performed for enhanced robustness and compatibility. The design and construction of synthetic microbial consortia have been expanded from two-species systems to multi-species systems, so that more sophisticated functions can be achieved. At the end of this paper, new research directions resulted from the interdisciplinary integration of synthetic biology and other disciplines are discussed.