Instanotes - Biology for Engineers

Engineering Biology (a broader term for Synthetic Biology) is the design and construction of new biological entities such as enzymes, genetic circuits, and cells or the redesign of existing biological systems. Engineering biology builds on the advances in molecular, cell, and systems biology and seeks to transform biology in the same way that synthesis transformed chemistry and integrated circuit design transformed computing. The element that distinguishes engineering biology from traditional molecular and cellular biology is the focus on the design and construction of core components (e.g., parts of enzymes, genetic circuits, metabolic pathways) that can be modeled, understood, and tuned to meet specific performance criteria, and the assembly of these smaller parts and devices into larger integrated systems to solve specific problems. Unlike many other areas of engineering, biology is incredibly non-linear and less predictable, and there is less knowledge of the parts and how they interact. Hence, the overwhelming physical details of natural biology (gene sequences, protein properties, biological systems) must be organized and recast via a set of design rules that hide information and manage complexity, thereby enabling the engineering of many-component integrated biological systems. It is only when this is accomplished that designs of significant scale will be possible