Communications - May 2008

ior. Computer scientists in synthetic biology teams help design the DNA fragments that must be inserted into a living cell and verify that the resulting genetic network is robust in the sense that small variations within the engineered cell mechanism are tolerated and will not result in malfunction.

The annual iGEM competition mentioned earlier is backed by a number of corporations, including Microsoft, which has established a systems biology group at its Research Center in Cambridge, England; researchers there explore the applications of Milner’s -calculus—developed to check the properties of mobile hardware, like cell phones—in systems biology. Ensuring that within a certain area a given number of calls can be handled properly by a provider’s technology has counterparts in systems biology. As such, a team led by Luca Cardelli, a Microsoft computer scientist in Cambridge, who previously engaged in research aimed at ensuring the correctness of distributed programs, is today developing formal languages to describe cell behavior [ 6].

Even if systems and synthetic biology experiments look simplistic, they are indeed the early prototypes of major advances in the field. With the help of

computer science, researchers and engineers will achieve the progress needed to transform systems and synthetic biology from pure science to indus-trial-scale reality. c

REFERENCES

1. Campbell, A.M. Meeting report: Synthetic biology jamboree for undergraduates. Cell Biology Education 4, 1 (Spring 2005), 19– 23.

2. Dijkstra, E. W. Solution of a problem in concurrent programming control. Commun. ACM 8, 9 (Sept. 1965), 569.

3. Gardner, T.S., Cantor, C.R., and Collins, J.J. Construction of a genetic toggle switch in Escherichia coli. Nature 403, 6767 (Jan. 2000).

4. Hopkin, K. Life: The next generation: Engineers and biologists team up to create synthetic biological systems. The Scientist 18, 19 (Oct. 2004).

5. Kitano, H. Systems biology: A brief overview. Science 295, (Mar. 2002).

6. Phillips, A., Cardelli, L., and Castagna, G. A graphical representation for biological processes in the stochastic pi-calculus. Transactions in Computational Systems Biology LN in CS 4230 (Nov. 2006), 123–152.

7. Pollack, A. The race to read genomes on a shoestring, relatively speaking. New York Times (Feb. 9, 2008).

8. Shapiro, E. and Benenson, Y. Bringing DNA computers to life. Scientific American 294, 5 (May 2006), 45– 51.

JACQUES COHEN ( jc@cs.brandeis.edu) is the TJX/Feldberg Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA.