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Synthetic biology has a strong modal dimension that is part and parcel of its engineering agenda. In turning hypothetical biological designs into actual synthetic constructs, synthetic biologists reach toward potential biology instead of concentrating on naturally evolved organisms. We analyze synthetic biology's goal of making biology easier to engineer through the combinatorial theory of possibility, which reduces possibility to (re)combinations of individuals and their attributes in the actual world. While the last decades of synthetic biology explorations have shown biology to be much more difficult to engineer than originally conceived, synthetic biology has not given up its combinatorial approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, Bechtel and Abrahamsen have argued that mathematical models study the dynamics of mechanisms by recomposing the components and their operations into an appropriately organized system. We will study this claim through the practice of combinational modeling in circadian clock research. In combinational modeling, experiments on model organisms and mathematical /computational models are combined with a new type of model--a synthetic model. We argue that the strategy of recomposition is more complicated than what Bechtel and Abrahamsen indicate. Moreover, synthetic modeling as a kind of material recomposition strategy also points beyond the mechanistic paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the Hopfield model as example of boundary objects used to analyze models in interdisciplinary research contexts. It provides biographical information about John Hopfield. It also narrates the epistemic difficulties with the Hopfield model and other similar models in translating a complex biological system into an abstract and simpler computational system. A brief discussion on synthetic biology as an attempt to overcome these difficulties is also presented.