In this Alife 2024 tutorial, we will explore how ideas from evolution and artificial life can advance synthetic biology. Join us for short lectures and interactive Gamestorming sessions to brainstorm how open-ended evolution can revolutionize biodesign.
Advances in synthetic biology have expanded our ability to engineer living systems – molecules, networks, genomes or ecosystems – with new-to-nature functionalities. Yet, how we design living systems often lacks the long-term evolutionary potential inherent in natural systems. In this workshop, we will consider this issue and explore 'evotype engineering', where a bioengineer not only designs the function a biosystem must perform but also sculpts its evolutionary capacity towards being more robust or adaptable when used. We will explore this idea from the perspective of open-ended search and how we might build strategies that enable continuous evolution and innovations that can underpin more powerful engineering biology workflows. This tutorial will explore the links between artificial life, synthetic biology and evolution via talks and interactive sessions. We welcome contributions at the intersection of synthetic biology, evolution and open-endedness from experimental, computational and theoretical perspectives.
This tutorial will take place on Thursday, July the 23rd, at the ALIFE Conference in Copenhagen.
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