Since the beginning of the 21st century, remarkable achievements have been made in theory and application of synthetic biology. The research status and future research prospect in synthetic biology were reviewed via the combination of bibliometric method and knowledge map visualization based on the data of 4,765 articles published from 2000 to 2019 in WoS (Web of Science) core collection. The results show that: the United States of America plays a leading role in the field of synthetic biology. China has surpassed the United Kingdom and became the second important contributor in the filed since 2014; The researches in fundamental study, metabolic engineering, circuit engineering and application make significant progress, which results in a more comprehensive discipline; The coordination of theory and application will be the main research direction.