John Cumbers
Despite ongoing scientific and technological advancements in the field of synthetic biology, there is a major bottleneck in the development of applications: design. The process of identifying the necessary components that need to be stitched together remains a laborious and time consuming task. This strategic action plan discusses the implementation of an accelerated design methodology for synthetic biology. This methodology, known as Integrated Concurrent Engineering (ICE) in the aerospace industry has cut preliminary design time at NASA from nine months to three weeks. Applying Integrated Concurrent Engineering to synthetic biology (SBICE) could significantly speed up the design, build and test cycles and could reshape the way we design genetic circuits, genomes and organisms.