Andrew Phillips 34 Computer-assisted genetic engineering

摘要

Synthetic biology offers the prospect of engineering microbes to fight disease or produce biofuels, but designing the necessary DNA instructions is normally an arduous task. With software written by Andrew Phillips, who heads the Biological Computation Group at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, U.K., scientists can simply select the actions they want the microbe's proteins to perform and get back a corresponding DNA sequence. The software bridges the gap between the kind of instructions biological designers would like to use—for example, "Convert protein A into protein B"—and the complicated reality inside cells, where countless reactions are taking place in parallel.