I don't think so. I think they just took a small existing bacteria and by pruning its genome came to something which was minimally viable.
That sounds something like CRISPR or gene modification of an existing organism genome, maybe even taking genes from one species and inserting them into another (taking bioluminescent jelly fish and putting certain genes into cats or plants to make them glow). But, I'm talking about more recent successes of actually reproducing the DNA (synthetic DNA) from the atomic level up not modifying existing "natural DNA".
Sorry, I don't have enough time to search for recent studies, but here is old article about first "synthetic DNA" we created and inserted into cells that took off and self-replicated back in 2008: https://www.wired.com/2010/05/scientists-create-first-self-r...
The link seems to reference the first success of fully synthetic DNA, but I have recently been listening to podcasts about more recent experiemnts/studies, specifically reproducing bacteria with full synthetic DNA (which is stripped down as much as possible to maintain viability) for the purpose of studying gene expression and hopefully begin to identify what the currently unknown genes sequences do.
But maybe I am wrong and this is in no way helpful for studying gene expression.
Haven't we already reproduced existing bacteria/DNA from atoms which has allowed us to more easily study gene expression?
Moreover, we take a bacteria with 200 genes ( we understand a lot of the gene functions/expressions, but we don't understand what all these 200 genes do). Thus, we synthetically reproduce the bacteria from the atoms up while removing nearly half of the genes that we determine are not needed to sustain the living bacteria, and the resulting synthetic bacteria we created in the lab allows us to more readily isolate and study the individual genes we didn't previously understand.