Open-endedness in synthetic biology: a route to continual innovation for biological design

Abstract

Design in synthetic biology is typically goal-oriented: aiming to repurpose and optimize existing biological functions for new contexts, augmenting biology with new-to-nature capabilities, or creating life-like systems from scratch. While the field has seen many advances over the past two decades, bottlenecks in the complexity of the systems built are emerging and designs that function in the lab often fail when used in real-world contexts. Here, we propose an open-ended approach to biological design that aims to continuously generate innovative solutions capable of overcoming such hurdles. The fundamental principle we put forward is that the novelty of designed biology, be it a protein, genetic construct or organism, is at least as important as how well it fulfils its goal. Designing with novelty in mind, rather than a sole focus on optimization towards a single ``best'' design, may allow us to move beyond the diminishing returns we see in performance for most engineered biology to date. Research from the artificial life and evolutionary computing communities has demonstrated that embracing novelty can allow for the automatic generation of innovative and surprising solutions to challenging problems that move us beyond local optima. Synthetic biology now offers the ideal playground to test these ideas in living systems and explore more creative approaches to biological design.

Plant science in the age of simulation intelligence

“…Our other work delves into how open-endedness and quality-diversity algorithms can contribute to biotechnology and synthetic biology ( Stock and Gorochowski, 2023 ). Expanding this perspective, we propose that open-endedness can significantly impact plant breeding, a critical aspect in ensuring global food security ( Lenaerts et al., 2019 ).…”

Synthetic Biology─High Time to Deliver?

“…Going from one dimension to the other makes the whole difference between a merely intellectual exercise and a truly transformative development . Alas, the conceptual excitement occasioned by SynBio has thus far been more supported than scale-up technologies–unfairly considered a lower-rank endeavor . The solution is just to learn from and to follow sound engineering practices and traditions.…”

“… 22 Alas, the conceptual excitement occasioned by SynBio has thus far been more supported than scale-up technologies–unfairly considered a lower-rank endeavor. 23 The solution is just to learn from and to follow sound engineering practices and traditions. Not doing so, in the long term, only weakens public trust in bioscience and biotechnology.…”