The Synthetic Biology Open Language (SBOL) provides a community standard for communicating designs in synthetic biology

Nat Biotechnol. 2014 Jun;32(6):545-50. doi: 10.1038/nbt.2891. Epub 2014 Jun 6.

Abstract

The re-use of previously validated designs is critical to the evolution of synthetic biology from a research discipline to an engineering practice. Here we describe the Synthetic Biology Open Language (SBOL), a proposed data standard for exchanging designs within the synthetic biology community. SBOL represents synthetic biology designs in a community-driven, formalized format for exchange between software tools, research groups and commercial service providers. The SBOL Developers Group has implemented SBOL as an XML/RDF serialization and provides software libraries and specification documentation to help developers implement SBOL in their own software. We describe early successes, including a demonstration of the utility of SBOL for information exchange between several different software tools and repositories from both academic and industrial partners. As a community-driven standard, SBOL will be updated as synthetic biology evolves to provide specific capabilities for different aspects of the synthetic biology workflow.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

  • Information Dissemination / methods*
  • Internationality
  • Reference Standards
  • Research Design / standards*
  • Software / standards*
  • Synthetic Biology / standards*
  • Terminology as Topic*
  • Vocabulary, Controlled*