
1
General Introduction
The main goal of the nascent fi eld of synthetic biology is to engineer an
artifi cial gene circuit and then insert it into the host cell to perform new
tasks. One useful analogy to conceptualize both the goal and methods of
synthetic biology is the computer engineering hierarchy. At the bottom of
the hierarchy of synthetic biology are DNA, RNA, proteins, and metabolites
(including lipids and carbohydrates, amino acids, and nucleotides),
analogous to the physical layer of transistors, capacitors, and resistors in
computer engineering (Andrianantoandro et al. 2006). The next layer, the
device layer, comprises biochemical reactions ...