Newswise — Genetic engineering has produced marvelous things, including drugs and foods. But the genetic modifications that made those products possible had to be hand-crafted by teams of Ph.D.-level scientists working on the cutting edge of molecular biology. That's largely because genetic engineers cannot draw from a standard set of well-described components when creating something new, the way electrical engineers can.
The authors describe how they and other synthetic biologists are trying to develop standard parts and design tools that will make the process of engineering the genes of an organism become more like engineering the components of an integrated circuit.
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