Synthetic biology at the cellular and ecological levels holds significant promise to solve imminent global challenges in agriculture, energy and human health.

Engineered biological solutions will need to be designed effectively to survive, grow and function in complex environments beyond the laboratory to achieve these goals.

The engineering design space contains trade-offs among the resource limitations to support cellular fitness, implementation of a desired function and mechanisms to constrain the organism to a desired niche.

Natural biological systems employ multiple strategies at the cellular, population and microbial community levels to continuously adapt to changing environments and to achieve a stable ecological function.

Engineering efforts should aim to extract natural design principles to develop compact and efficient designs that implement functionally equivalent behaviors.