ReviewScience advances2024
Open-endedness in synthetic biology: A route to continual innovation for biological design.
Review in Science advances, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 25 citations in OpenAlex.
- Research progress on metabolic engineering for efficient squalene synthesis in yeast cell factories.Biotechnology letters · 2026Review
- Cascading recombinase memory switch for programmable and stable gene expression in Pseudomonas putida.Nucleic acids research · 2026Article
- Whole-genome combinatorial gene fusions generate novel genes for advanced microbial trait development.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Liquid-in-Liquid Prints: High-Density Biochemically Encoded Information Preserved in Microdroplet Arrays.Advanced materials (Deerfield Beach, Fla.) · 2026Article
- Reconstituting alternative life using the test-bed of cell-free systems.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Why cellular computations challenge our design principles.Seminars in cell & developmental biology · 2025Review
- Designing live bacterial therapeutics for cancer.Advanced drug delivery reviews · 2025Review
- Emerging trends in genome integration tools for precision engineering of diverse bacterial species.Synthetic biology (Oxford, England) · 2025Review
- Bioengineering hybrid artificial life.Frontiers in bioinformatics · 2025Review
- Cell-Free Synthesis: Expediting Biomanufacturing of Chemical and Biological Molecules.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- An integrated engineering worldview of synthetic biology education through the lens of webinar based pedagogy.Frontiers in bioengineering and biotechnology · 2024Article
- Synthetic Biology─High Time to Deliver?ACS synthetic biology · 2023Article
- Plant science in the age of simulation intelligence.Frontiers in plant science · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Design in synthetic biology is typically goal oriented, aiming to repurpose or optimize existing biological functions, augmenting biology with new-to-nature capabilities, or creating life-like systems from scratch. While the field has seen many advances, 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, with the novelty of designed biology being at least as important as how well it fulfils its goal. Rather than solely focusing on optimization toward a single best design, designing with novelty in mind may allow us to move beyond the diminishing returns we see in performance for most engineered biology. Research from the artificial life community has demonstrated that embracing novelty can automatically generate innovative and unexpected solutions to challenging problems beyond local optima. Synthetic biology offers the ideal playground to explore more creative approaches to biological design.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.