[BBF Standards] Two separate standards

[Drew Endy]

Exactly correct.

DNA engineers will be concerned with how to construct DNA.

Parts engineers will be concerned with how to build parts at the  
primary nucleic and amino acid sequence level (and whatever else  
synthetic biological parts get made from).

Device engineers will be concerned with how parts are best organized  
to make devices.

System engineers will be concerned with how devices are best organized  
to make systems.

Each type of engineer needs to be able to communicate at least one  
level "down" and "up" in this abstraction hierarchy.  Such  
communication should be limited and well structured.

Meanwhile, I don't mean to add fuel to any "larger than life T7  
autogene fires," but check out the last 6 pages from the synthetic  
biology comic book, if you've not seen it before.

http://www.nature.com/nature/comics/syntheticbiologycomic/index.html

Pages 7-8 detail making a device from parts.

Pages 9-12 detail some issues of common signal carriers for  
transcription based devices.

Cheers!
D.




On Mar 15, 2008, at 2:11 PM, Herbert Sauro wrote:

>
> I think Deepak has made a useful observation. At one level an engineer
> won't care about the DNA sequence, of more interest is the functional
> properties of the boxes he/she is putting together. On the other hand,
> the designer of functional boxes will be concerned with the DNA  
> sequence
> since in designing for example a promoter or gene with a specific
> property the DNA sequence is clearly paramount. It looks like there  
> may
> be a natural separation here.
>
> Herbert Sauro
>
>
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