Stability, robustness, and containment: preparing synthetic biology for real-world deployment

Abstract

As engineered microbes are used in increasingly diverse applications across human health and bioproduction, the field of synthetic biology will need to focus on strategies that stabilize and contain the function of these populations within target environments. To this end, recent advancements have created layered sensing circuits that can compute cell survival, genetic contexts that are less susceptible to mutation, burden, and resource control circuits, and methods for population variability reduction. These tools expand the potential for real-world deployment of complex microbial systems by enhancing their environmental robustness and functional stability in the face of unpredictable host response and evolutionary pressure.