Accelerating Forward Engineering at Genome Scale:According to Inscripta, CRISPR technology and machine learning can supercharge the iterative development of biological systems

摘要

Harnessing the power of biology to create products of commercial and scientific value is a challenging problem. The goal of reducing biological engineering to a predictable discipline akin to mechanical or electrical engineering, while laudable, has met with limited success since many of the governing rules are still not known or well understood. Because fully engineering biological systems from first principles remains a distant dream, forward biological engineering will, for the foreseeable future,stay grounded in empirical methods requiring iterative design-create-test-learn (DCTL) cycles. The "create" part of DCTL refers to the transformational CRISPR-EnAbled Trackable genome Engineering (CREATE) technology that enables massively parallel genome editing.