About this Research Topic
Computer-aided design (CAD) has revolutionized many engineering fields allowing for the quick exploration and testing of ideas in silico without the need for them to be physically built. The maturing field of synthetic biology offers some unique challenges for CAD; there is a need to handle high levels of uncertainty due to our often-limited knowledge of the underlying biology, capture the stochastic nature of many biological processes, and accommodate the pervasive multi-scale structure and interactions present within these systems. Even so, numerous advancements are being made to support CAD-based approaches to bioengineering. These are helping to both accelerate our ability to efficiently assemble synthetic biological systems and uncover the guiding principles for effective biodesign across scales.
This Research Topic intends to collate Original Research articles, Methods, Reports, Reviews, Mini-Reviews, Perspectives and Opinion articles on the use of computer-aided design for bioengineering across scales. It will cover topics spanning: de novo protein design, synthetic information processing systems in cells, metabolic and whole-cell (re)design, and moving beyond single cells (e.g. multicellular systems, synthetic ecologies and terraformation), plus the computational methodologies (e.g. machine learning, biodesign automation, multi-agent modelling, etc.) and data exchange standards that underpin such approaches.
Structure:
We aim to find around 10 contributions in total covering the key areas above and supplement this with a short editorial providing an overview of the topics covered. Ideally, we would like a mix of contribution types with around 2 perspectives, 3 reviews and 5 research articles.
Timeline:
We will advertise and solicit contributions in October 2019 and will have a deadline for submission of April 2020. It is expected that publication after peer-review will take place in late-summer 2020.
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Boyan Yordanov is an employee of Microsoft Research. All other Topic Editors declare no competing interests with regards to this Research Topic.
Keywords: Biodesign, Synthetic Biology, Bioengineering, Computer-Aided Design, Multi-Scale
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.