Motivation: Synthetic Biology is the engineering of biological entities to perform novel and desirable functions. Synthetic biologists already make use of computational resources to a large extent which can be seen by the software tools such as CLONEQC, Biskit and Internet based repositories such as the MIT Biobrick library at http://partsregistry.org/Main_Page. In both Systems and Synthetic Biology analysis consists of researchers taking the outputs from some software and feeding it to the inputs of other software. This pipeline or workflow can be computerised by using software such as Taverna. Research into the application of computerised workflows to Synthetic Biology has revealed the paucity of published material in this area. Therefore, this has been identified as an opportunity for research and possible development of tools, which could greatly enhance methodologies and workflows in Synthetic Biology. We show how an e-Science approach, i.e. the utilisation of advanced computing resources and technologies to support scientists, benefits the Synthetic Biology engineering process. We further propose a development life-cycle and show how this approach can improve the design of synthetic biological entities.
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