Synthetic Biology : Only a Game ?

As a continuation of our laboratory project we analyzed the relationship between synthetic biology and games, two concepts that turned out to be connected on many levels. We wanted to describe and characterize different aspects and also tried to integrate our own project into this system. For one thing synthetic biology can be used to play common games in a new way, possibly for educational purposes or as a basis for proof-of-principle experiments for new circuits. More recently synthetic biologists also started to use games as a research tool, an innovative approach to make use of crowdsourcing and distributed computing. We also observed that synthetic biology is very often described and explained using game metaphors like Lego. In this work we want to present examples for all these aspects, find correlations and discuss possible consequences for Synthetic Biology.

We thank our sponsors: