Synthetic and integrative biology

Systems biology allows one to explore life's design principles, whereas synthetic biology exploits these principles from an engineering perspective. For all that, the capacity of synthetic biology to make progress in the most fundamental areas of knowledge must not be neglected, when, for example, it concerns distinguishing between contingency hypotheses, or physicochemical constraint hypotheses to explain the universality of a phenomenon. A difficult question is the efficient passage from analysis to synthesis. We have tested this passage in our small team, looking at the existence of a global scheme for transcriptional regulation in organisms. However, these results, using systems biology, suggest a biomimetic strategy for the co-regulation of numerous genes involved, for example, in a metabolic circuit designed by an engineer. (C) 2010 Academie des sciences. Published by Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.