Introducing high-level modular design to synthetic bio-system development

Despite the noticeable advancement in synthetic biology techniques, developing novel biological systems can still be difficult. This partially stems from issues with optimising designs in an iterative manner, as there is a strong reliance on genetic engineering which is often a long and costly process. Additionally, aspects of biological designs can be difficult to re-use in new systems due to a lack of context-free characterisation and incompatible assembly standards.

In this talk, I will discuss a method for applying high-level modularisation to the development of biological systems. It has numerous advantages, from promoting the re-use of elements of previous systems, to simplifying the top-down design automation. I will show one example, a genetic biosensor build from three functional modules (a detector, a signal processor, and a reporter), where each module is expressed in separate cells, that have been characterised using a multifactorial Design of Experiments (DoE) approach to provide context-free characterisation.