Genetic engineering is a powerful tool for biologists and geneticists to study the natural world. In general, it allows for asking and answering precise gene or DNA level questions about biological systems. The drawback of genetic engineering is that many applications requires a deep knowledge of multiple disciplines from biology to chemistry, which can make it inaccessible. Here I give a brief history of the field and define four tenets of necessary actions to begin engineering DNA, and four classes of applications using genetic engineering. I present three papers that define an accessible method of genome editing using CRISPR/Cas called GeneWeld, and describe two series of tools pGTag and pPRISM that reduce the materials cost of beginning genetic engineering experiments. I describe use cases for each tool, and finally present an expansion of the methodology and tools to generate synthetic alleles and examine their function in living zebrafish. We expect that these tools and methods will increase the accessibility of genetic engineering using and enable new kinds of research questions
