ABSTRACT

The design process can be dened as the set of steps an engineer takes in constructing a system to achieve a specied task. The rst step is conceptualisation of the problem, including the objectives of the task and any other design constraints, such as safety or reliability. Once these have been established, an initial set of solutions is proposed. It is often not feasible to construct all the possible solutions, so the initial set of solutions is reduced by estimating their performance with respect to the objectives and constraints. The designs that are likely to offer the best performance are then implemented and tested to see how well their behaviour achieves the required goal in the real world. Information about the real-world performance feeds back to the design stage where the designs are modied accordingly. This process is repeated until a satisfactory solution is achieved. This is known as the design-build-test cycle. Computer aided design (CAD) tools that facilitate this process are integral to all engineering disciplines. Synthetic biology can be dened as the application of the engineering design process to construct novel biological systems. It is precisely this application of forward design that separates synthetic biology from traditional approaches such as molecular biology and genetic engineering.