1Biosciences Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37831, USA
2The Center for Bioenergy Innovation, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37831, USA
3Department of Bioengineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
4Department of Chemical and Systems Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
5Stanford ChEM-H, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
6Warwick Integrative Synthetic Biology Centre (WISB) and School of Life Sciences, University of Warwick, CV4 7AL Coventry, UK
7ISSB, CNRS, Univ Evry, CEA, Université Paris-Saclay, 91025 Evry, France
8Institute for Integrative Systems Biology (I2SysBio), University of Valencia-CSIC, 46980 Paterna, Spain
9Department of Plant Sciences, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996, USA
10Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, China
| Received 14 Nov 2019 |
Accepted 14 Nov 2019 |
Published 22 Nov 2019 |
Over the course of civilization, humans have increasingly expanded their freedom to live a better life. In comparison with the primitive society, our modern society has many more choices of life-supporting resources, such as year-round food supply, permanent shelters, diverse energy sources, and effective preventive and curing medicine. However, our society is currently still heavily relying on the resources provided by Mother Nature, which cannot meet the future global needs in terms of both quantity and quality under the pressure of population growth, natural resource reduction, and environmental deterioration. For example, the food sources originating from plants, animals, or microbes do not have the nutrition balance for optimal human health [1–3]. Climate change and environmental deterioration threaten the food security [4–6]. Increasingly, infectious diseases (e.g., HIV/AIDS), genetic diseases (e.g., cancer), and improper lifestyle-related disorders (e.g., obesity) become more prevalent and remain challenging to be prevented, controlled, and cured. Conventional medical technologies and modern medicine development are also meeting the ceiling. Antibiotic resistance is threatening the health of humans, animals, and environment [7]. As the human lifespan continues to increase, aging-related diseases, disorders, and poor life quality are becoming global challenges [8]. Plants, animals, and microbes in nature have evolved as part of our Earth ecosystem, not for benefiting humans. Even though humans have put forth tremendous efforts to domesticate plants, animals, and microbes based on random/induced mutations, hybridization, and limited genetic modifications via biological engineering, the improved food and industrial crop plants, animals, and microbial strains are still far from optimized for meeting the human needs. In other words, natural evolution and domestication in plants, animals, and microbes are tinkering processes and therefore cannot meet the ever-exploding population on the one hand and the unending appetite for living better quality life on the other. One promising strategy for solving these global challenges is to employ revolutionary biosystems design (also called biodesign), which is defined as predictable modification of existing organisms or creation of new organisms using rational engineering or automated design based on the theory and principles of biosystems design.
