Sharing Structure and Function in Biological Design with SBOL 2.0.

To collaboratively design synthetic biology systems, it is important to communicate both the structural and functional aspects of a design in a standard manner. This paper presents the Synthetic Biology Open Language (SBOL) 2.0 and demonstrates how this standard enables effective collaborative design across different institutions and tools. SBOL 2.0 serves the diverse interests of the synthetic biology community. The standard includes the ability to describe both functional and structural aspects of a design, including DNA, RNA, small molecules, and proteins, as well as their interactions as part of functional modules. SBOL 2.0 has been developed via consensus, with careful consideration of recent design trends in synthetic biology and real use cases submitted by members of the commercial biotechnology community. The standard thus provides researchers with a standardized representation for describing, manipulating, and reproducing biological designs across the synthetic biology community. This paper demonstrates how a set of SBOL-enabled tools can form a complex workflow to share and exchange designs for representative use cases between different organizations and tool suites. We also describe the development support in the form of software libraries, which facilitate the integration of the SBOL 2.0 standard into software tools.