Fast, cheap and somewhat in control

Adam P Arkin¹^,2^,3 and Daniel A Fletcher²^,4

¹Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Department of Bioengineering, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA

²Physical Biosciences Division, E.O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA

³Virtual Institute of Microbial Stress and Survival, Berkeley, CA 94710, USA

⁴Department of Bioengineering, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA

author email corresponding author email

Genome Biology 2006, 7:114doi:10.1186/gb-2006-7-8-114


Published:	30 August 2006

Subject areas: Bioinformatics, Evolution, Biochemistry and structural biology

Abstract

Efforts to manipulate living organisms have raised the question of whether engineering principles of hierarchy, abstraction and design can be applied to biological systems. Here, we consider the practical challenges to controlling living organisms that must be surmounted, or at least managed, if synthetic biology and cellular bioengineering are to be productive.