Synthetic Biology:Abstraction hierarchy

Motivation
Abstraction hierarchies are a human invention designed to assist people in engineering very complex systems by ignoring unnecessary details. If the process to design a biological system was to write down the string of nucleotides, it would immediately become untenable even for experts to design anything but very simple systems. Most people just aren't capable of processing that kind of detail all at once. If instead, an abstraction hierarchy is specified, it allows the designer of a biological system to ignore some of the implementation details and focus only on the high-level design issues.

Engineers in all disciplines take advantage of abstraction hierarchies to design and build complicated systems. For instance, software engineers write in high level programming languages like C++ or Java which are designed to be easy for humans to read and write. These programs are then translated into lower level sets of instructions that are more easily translatable to bit strings that are machine interpretable and implementable. Thus, the people who write C++ programs do not need to know how to translate their programs to machine code and the people who work on instruction sets do not need to envision all possible programs that the software engineer might write.

To enable the engineering of very complex biological systems, it will be necessary to develop abstraction hierarchies for biological engineering. At this point, it is not necessarily clear which hierarchies are most useful and in fact it may be slightly premature to try and develop them. Nevertheless, thinking about what an abstraction hierarchy in synthetic biology should look like might help us think about the "right" way to engineer biological systems and to design biological parts.

Below several abstraction hierachies are listed that might be appropriate for biological engineering. Anyone should feel free to revise them, add new candidate hierarchies or add comments as this is very much a work in progress. An attempt has been made to give credit to the originators of each of the candidate abstraction hierarchies; however, this should in no way be a deterrent to those interested in offering revisions. The abstraction hierarchies have been listed in chronological order of inception.

DNA, parts, devices and systems model


The original abstraction hierarchy is posted on the Registry page and is originally from one of Drew's slides.

by Drew Endy.

Screenability model
by Jason Kelly.

Composition model
See Synthetic Biology:Abstraction hierarchy/Composition model for notes on the abstraction hierarchy developed based on composability.

by Reshma Shetty and Barry Canton.

Network layer model
This model derives inspiration from the OSI model for computer network protocols.

Version 1
by Austin Che.

Version 2
This version attempts to reconcile the network layer model with the composition model.

by Barry Canton.

See Synthetic Biology:Abstraction hierarchy/Network layer model for more detailed and extensive notes on the network layer model.