Open-endedness in synthetic biology: A route to continual innovation for biological design

Design in synthetic biology is typically goal oriented, aiming to repurpose or optimize existing biological functions, augmenting biology with new-to-nature capabilities, or creating life-like systems from scratch. While the field has seen many advances, bottlenecks in the complexity of the systems built are emerging and designs that function in the lab often fail when used in real-world contexts. Here, we propose an open-ended approach to biological design, with the novelty of designed biology being at least as important as how well it fulfils its goal. Rather than solely focusing on optimization toward a single best design, designing with novelty in mind may allow us to move beyond the diminishing returns we see in performance for most engineered biology. Research from the artificial life community has demonstrated that embracing novelty can automatically generate innovative and unexpected solutions to challenging problems beyond local optima. Synthetic biology offers the ideal playground to explore more creative approaches to biological design.