Capturing Multicellular System Designs Using Synthetic Biology Open Language (SBOL)

Synthetic
biology aims to develop novel biological systems and
increase their reproducibility using engineering principles such as
standardization and modularization. It is important that these systems
can be represented and shared in a standard way to ensure they can
be easily understood, reproduced, and utilized by other researchers.
The Synthetic Biology Open Language (SBOL) is a data standard for
sharing biological designs and information about their implementation
and characterization. Previously, this standard has only been used
to represent designs in systems where the same design is implemented
in every cell; however, there is also much interest in multicellular
systems, in which designs involve a mixture of different types of
cells with differing genotype and phenotype. Here, we show how the
SBOL standard can be used to represent multicellular systems, and,
hence, how researchers can better share designs with the community
and reliably document intended system functionality.