Soft to Wet: Morphogenetic Engineering in Synthetic Biology

Synthetic biology is an emerging scientific discipline that promotes the standardized manufacturing of biological com-ponents without natural equivalents. It is currently in search of design principles to achieve a reliable and secure level of functionality from reusable biological parts, as exemplified by BioBricks. The goal is to create artificial living systems that can meet various needs in application domains such as health care, nanotechnology, energy, and chemistry. So far, most of the studies in this field have focused on the low level, seeking to characterize and validate the elementary proper-ties of an individual bacterium. However, beyond genetic engineering problems and bioinformatics tools, computer scientists also view synthetic biology as a systems design challenge, and liken it to large software systems and elec-tronic circuits