Evolution occurs when selective pressures from the environment shape inherited variation
over time. Within the laboratory, evolution is commonly used to engineer proteins and RNA …

One of the most remarkable features of biological systems is their ability to adapt to the
constantly changing environment. By harnessing principles of control theory, synthetic …

Microbial physiology exhibits growth laws that relate the macromolecular composition of the
cell to the growth rate. Recent work has shown that these empirical regularities can be …

Efforts to manipulate living organisms have raised the question of whether engineering
principles of hierarchy, abstraction and design can be applied to biological systems. Here …

The concepts of functional equivalence classes and information control in living systems are
useful to characterize downward (or top-down) causation by feedback information control in …

Evolutionary responses that rescue populations from extinction when drastic environmental
changes occur can be friend or foe. The field of conservation biology is concerned with the …

Introduction Engineering of cell fate through synthetic gene circuits requires methods to
precisely implement control around native decision-making pathways and offers the …

Cellular regulation is believed to evolve in response to environmental variability. However,
this has been difficult to test directly. Here, we show that a gene regulation system evolves to …

Faced with the problem of con-trolling a physical system, an en-gineer will identify a model
for the system, and then use this model to design a process for automatically actuating some …

Recent evidence suggests that the metabolism of some organisms, such as Escherichia coli,
is remarkably efficient, producing close to the maximum amount of biomass per unit of …