SBOL: A community standard for communicating designs in synthetic biology

Abstract The Synthetic Biology Open Language (SBOL) is a proposed data standard for exchanging designs within the synthetic biology community. SBOL represents synthetic biology designs in a community-adopted, formalized format for exchange between software tools, research groups, and commercial service providers. The re-use of previously validated designs is critical to the evolution of synthetic biology from a research discipline to an engineering practice. As a community-driven standard, SBOL adapts as synthetic biology evolves, providing specific capabilities for different aspects of the synthetic biology workflow. The SBOL Developers Group has implemented SBOL 1.1 as an XML/RDF serialization and provides software libraries and specification documentation to help developers implement SBOL in their own software. This paper also reports on early successes, including a demonstration of the utility of SBOL for information exchange between three different tools from three academic sites.