Abstract
“What I cannot create, I do not understand.” -Richard Feynman
Organisms are complex systems that run massively parallel and interactive molecular processes. From an H-atom to the whole cell, cells manage information over at least six orders of magnitude in size. To understand a system that integrates contextual, temporal and spatial complexity by default, calls for innovative and massive data gathering efforts. Data gathered over the last two decades has revealed a huge inventory of molecular parts and contextual interactions. Still a good understanding of biology is lacking.
In the early 2000, people asked: can one assemble biological systems from scratch from a standard inventory of parts, instead of relying upon the naturally evolved systems. One of the key foundational papers that hinted towards engineering approach to biology, was a three gene circuit called repressilator that was plugged into E.coli as a non-native applet and stably expressed (Elowitz and Leibler, Nature 403:335–338, 2000). This paper accelerated the thought process that we now know as synthetic biology.
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Patil, M., Dhar, P. (2015). A Brief Introduction to Synthetic Biology. In: Singh, V., Dhar, P. (eds) Systems and Synthetic Biology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9514-2_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9514-2_12
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