Rational Design: Best Route for Synthetic Biology?

May 26, 2014

(Harvard Wyss Institute) – In an issue of Nature (vol. 509, issue 7499), Wyss Institute Core Faculty member Pamela Silver and Senior Staff Scientist Jeffrey Way argue that rational design can be used to predictably engineer new biological systems. The goal in rational design is to harness our understanding of biology – which has exploded in the last few decades, they say – to build a library of well understood and characterized modular, biological parts, such as genes and proteins, whose functions are well understood and use these parts to assemble new biological systems with predictable and reliable outcomes.