Engineering biological organisms is a complex, challenging, and often slow process. Other engineering domains have addressed such challenges with a combination of standardization and automation, enabling a divide‐and‐conquer approach to complexity and greatly increasing productivity. For example, standardization and automation allow rapid and predictable translation of prototypes into fielded applications (e.g., “design for manufacturability”), simplify sharing and reuse of work between groups, and enable reliable outsourcing and integration of specialized subsystems. Although this approach has also been part of the vision of synthetic biology, almost since its very inception (Knight & Sussman, 1998), this vision still remains largely unrealized (Carbonell et al, 2019). Despite significant progress over the last two decades, which have for example allowed obtaining and editing DNA sequences in easier and cheaper ways, the full process of organism engineering is still typically rather slow, manual, and artisanal.

中文翻译：

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合成生物学工程的自主程度

工程生物有机体是一个复杂、具有挑战性且通常缓慢的过程。其他工程领域已经通过标准化和自动化的结合解决了这些挑战，从而实现了对复杂性的分而治之的方法，并大大提高了生产力。例如，标准化和自动化允许将原型快速和可预测地转换为现场应用程序（例如，“可制造性设计”），简化组间工作的共享和重用，并实现专业子系统的可靠外包和集成。尽管这种方法也是合成生物学愿景的一部分，几乎自其诞生之日起（Knight & Sussman，1998），这一愿景在很大程度上仍未实现（Carbonell et al, 2019)。尽管在过去的二十年里取得了重大进展，例如允许以更容易和更便宜的方式获取和编辑 DNA 序列，但生物体工程的整个过程通常仍然相当缓慢、手动和手工。