BIOLOGISTS AND ENGINEERS are working together to develop the field of synthetic biology 1. These researchers are attempting to design synthetic genetic circuits that enable bacteria to consume toxic waste 2, destroy tumors 3, and produce drugs 4 and bio-fuels 5. While experimental methods for genetic engineering have existed for a long time, synthetic biology adds a principled design methodology that is supported by repositories of standard genetic parts, high-level model abstractions, and an automated construction process. Since standards, abstraction, and automated construction are the cornerstones of electronic design automation (EDA) which has enabled the design of more complex integrated circuits each year, it is logical that experiences with EDA will be leveraged during the development of genetic design automation (GDA). There are over 230 systems biology tools listed at http://www.sbml.org including commercial tools such as MathWork's SimBiology. While many of these tools can assist synthetic biologists with model construction and analysis, most are not developed specifically for GDA.
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