ToProB 2015 - Towards Programmable Biology Workshop

Synthetic Biology's vision to repurpose living cells as substrates for general computation has manifested itself in genetic circuit designs that attempt to implement Boolean logic gates, digital memory, oscillators, and other circuits from electrical engineering. Yet, the various achievements in the realm of Synthetic Biology remain isolated and generally lack the modularity and scalability of their electronic counterparts. This workshop revisits cornerstone achievements in Synthetic Biology research that address general computability in biological substrates, in order to demarcate key in-vivo and in-silico challenges of this novel research area. Topics will deal with how paradigms borrowed from digital, electronic devices are best implemented in large-scale biological substrates, and whether unconventional computing paradigms, such as those developed in the research field of Artificial Life, might offer more promising routes toward full-fledged biological computation.