Evolution as Design Engineer

Exponential growth in digital information gathering, storage, and processing capabilities for biological data herald a new age of biology, when entire biological systems can potentially be understood. In order to facilitate human understanding of electronic components, the electronic design automation (EDA) industry has developed clean abstractions and design rules, enabling pervasive design reuse. We con-ions and design rules, enabling pervasive design reuse. We conjecture that design reuse arises as an emergent property in biological systems driven by the pressure for efficiency in evolution. Design reuse requires clean abstractions and interfaces, and these fortuitously provide an opportunity for human understanding and exploitation with computational toolsets. We draw some conclusions about future systems biology toolsets that might be inspired by EDA tools.