The practices of synthetic biology are being integrated into ‘multiscale’ designs enabling two-way communication across organic and inorganic information substrates in biological, digital and cyber-physical system integrations. Novel applications of ‘bio-informational’ engineering will arise in environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, precision medicine and next-generation biomanufacturing. Potential developments include sentinel plants for environmental monitoring and autonomous bioreactors that respond to biosensor signaling. As bio-informational understanding progresses, both natural and engineered biological systems will need to be reimagined as cyber-physical architectures. We propose that a multiple length scale taxonomy will assist in rationalizing and enabling this transformative development in engineering biology.

合成生物学的实践正在被整合到“多尺度”设计中，从而能够在生物、数字和网络物理系统集成中跨有机和无机信息基质进行双向通信。“生物信息”工程的新应用将出现在环境监测、精准农业、精准医疗和下一代生物制造领域。潜在的发展包括用于环境监测的哨兵植物和响应生物传感器信号的自主生物反应器。随着生物信息理解的进步，自然和工程生物系统都需要重新构想为网络物理架构。我们建议，多长度尺度分类法将有助于合理化和实现工程生物学的这种变革性发展。