Putting the Cart before the Horse: Designing a Metabolic System in order to Understand it

摘要

Ultimately, undertanding life at the molecular level is a question of reverse engineering, i.e. deducing functions and how the design fulfils those functions. In the world of technology, experience in forward-engineering, i.e. designing a machine to do something, is usually a pre-requisite for success in reverse engineering similar machines. In order to gain such experience for becoming better reverse engineers of life, we design a metabolic system from scratch to perform a predefined set of functions.