Highly relevant book: Modeling Life by Alan Garfinkel. Assumes only knowledge of algebra and teaches the foundational skills of differential equation modeling. Best book I bought this year.
If you're interested in this, you may also be interested in BioBricks (<a href="https://biobricks.org/" rel="nofollow">https://biobricks.org/</a>) and iGEM (<a href="https://igem.org/" rel="nofollow">https://igem.org/</a>).
I'm curious if there's overlap between this and P System: <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_system" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_system</a>