Beal Jacob, Rogers Miles
Raytheon BBN Technologies, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Mol Syst Biol. 2020 Dec;16(12):e10019. doi: 10.15252/msb.202010019.
Engineering biological organisms is a complex, challenging, and often slow process. Other engineering domains have addressed such challenges with a combination of standardization and automation, enabling a divide-and-conquer approach to complexity and greatly increasing productivity. For example, standardization and automation allow rapid and predictable translation of prototypes into fielded applications (e.g., "design for manufacturability"), simplify sharing and reuse of work between groups, and enable reliable outsourcing and integration of specialized subsystems. Although this approach has also been part of the vision of synthetic biology, almost since its very inception (Knight & Sussman, 1998), this vision still remains largely unrealized (Carbonell et al, 2019). Despite significant progress over the last two decades, which have for example allowed obtaining and editing DNA sequences in easier and cheaper ways, the full process of organism engineering is still typically rather slow, manual, and artisanal.
设计生物有机体是一个复杂、具有挑战性且通常很缓慢的过程。其他工程领域通过标准化和自动化相结合的方式应对了此类挑战，从而实现了对复杂性的分而治之方法，并极大地提高了生产力。例如，标准化和自动化使得原型能够快速且可预测地转化为实际应用（例如“面向制造的设计”），简化了团队之间工作的共享和复用，并实现了专业子系统的可靠外包和集成。尽管几乎从合成生物学诞生之初（奈特和苏斯曼，1998年）起，这种方法就一直是合成生物学愿景的一部分，但这一愿景在很大程度上仍未实现（卡尔维诺等人，2019年）。尽管在过去二十年中取得了重大进展，例如使得以更简便、更廉价的方式获取和编辑DNA序列成为可能，但生物有机体工程的整个过程通常仍然相当缓慢、依赖人工且具有手工性质。
