Systems biology and synthetic biology are said to represent ‘two sides of the same coin,’ with systems biology focussing on understanding and synthetic biology on construction. This notion is based on the implicit assumption that understanding and construction (or science and engineering) are, in themselves, ‘two sides of the same coin.’ Moreover, synthetic biology has been framed as an approac...

Summary The tRNA Adaptation Index (tAI) is a tRNA-centric measure of translation efficiency which includes weights that take into account the efficiencies of the different wobble interactions. To enable the calculation of the index based on a species-specific inference of these weights, we created the stAI calc . The calculator includes optimized tAI weights for 100 species from the three domai...

A commitment to 'making'--creating or producing things--can shape scientific and technological fields in important ways. This article demonstrates this by exploring synthetic biology, a field committed to making use of advanced techniques from molecular biology in order to make with living matter (and for some, to engineer living matter). I describe and analyse how this field's 'drive to make' ...

Integrating synthetic biology and systems biology efforts can advance our understanding of biomolecular systems. This is illustrated in this issue by Cantone et al. (2009), who construct a synthetic gene network in yeast and use it to assess and benchmark systems biology approaches for reverse engineering endogenous gene networks.