Systems and Synthetic Biology from Models to Experiments on Networks and Genetic Circuits The role of noise in biological systems.

Systems and Synthetic biology are emerging fields at the intersection of Biology, Physics and Engineering whose aim is to develop a systematic approach to the comprehension design and implementation of existing and new biological systems capable of performing a desired task. One of the main challenges is to adapt classical engineering strategies such as standardization, decoupling and abstraction to the inherent complexity of biological systems, a task made more difficult by our only partial understanding of the underlying biological principles. In this article we address the different modeling strategies that have been developed to analyze and design the behavior of the basic biological parts utilized and their interconnections, with a particular focus on gene regulatory networks.