ABSTRACT
This chapter overviews some of the methodologies, and some interesting use cases for systems-level modelling to inform circuit design for synthetic biology. Synthetic biology is a departure from the more conventional genetic engineering, which typically focuses on altering a few genes within an organism. Synthetic biology seeks to engineer more wholesale changes to existing cells, heralding the construction of more elaborate systems from the scratch. The international genetically engineered machine (iGEM) competition, organised by the iGEM foundation, is a unique annual competition in synthetic biology, where multi-disciplinary teams from all over the world design, build, test, and characterise a system of their own design. The classic “circuit design” experiments played a key role in the early blooming of synthetic biology. They also set the stage for the key goal of synthetic biology—to design biological circuits that carry out a specific function, much like electronic circuits.
