Perspective: Engineering noise in biological systems towards predictive stochastic design

Abstract

Significant progress has been made towards engineering both single-cell and multi-cellular systems through a combination of synthetic and systems biology,nanobiotechnology, pharmaceutical science, and computational approaches.However, our ability to engineer systems that begin to approach the complexity ofnatural pathways is severely limited by important challenges, e.g. due to noise, orthe fluctuations in gene expression and molecular species at multiple scales (e.g.both intra- and inter-cellular fluctuations). This barrier to engineering requires thatbiological noise be recognized as a design element with fundamentals that can beactively controlled. Here we highlight studies of an emerging discipline that collectively strives to engineer noise towards predictive stochastic design using interdisciplinary approaches at multiple-scales in diverse living systems.