Perspective: Engineering noise in biological systems towards predictive stochastic design

Significant progress has been made towards engineering both single-cell and multi-cellular systems through a combination of synthetic and systems biology, nanobiotechnology, pharmaceutical science, and computational approaches. However, our ability to engineer systems that begin to approach the complexity of natural pathways is severely limited by important challenges, e.g. due to noise, or the fluctuations in gene expression and molecular species at multiple scales (e.g. both intra- and inter-cellular fluctuations). This barrier to engineering requires that biological noise be recognized as a design element with fundamentals that can be actively controlled. Here we highlight studies of an emerging discipline that collectively strives to engineer noise towards predictive stochastic design using interdisciplinary approaches at multiple-scales in diverse living systems.