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.

摘要 合成生物学开放语言（Synthetic Biology Open Language，SBOL）是一项面向合成生物学社群内部设计方案交换的数据标准。SBOL以一种被该社群广泛采纳的形式化格式来表征合成生物学设计方案，以供软件工具、研究团队与商业服务提供商之间实现交互。复用此前经过验证的设计方案，对于合成生物学从研究学科向工程化实践的演进而言至关重要。作为一项由社群驱动的标准，SBOL会随合成生物学的发展而适配更新，可为合成生物学工作流的不同环节提供专属功能。SBOL开发者工作组已将SBOL 1.1版本实现为XML/RDF序列化格式，并提供软件库与规范文档，以协助开发者在其自研软件中集成SBOL。本文同时汇报了早期实践成果，包括验证了SBOL在来自三个学术站点的三款不同工具间进行信息交换的实用性。