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

Synthetic biology aims to improve the development of biological systems and increase their reproducibility through the use of engineering principles, such as standardisation and modularisation. It is important that these systems can be represented and shared in a standard way to ensure they are easily understood, reproduced, and utilised by other researchers. The Synthetic Biology Open Language (SBOL) is a data standard for sharing biological designs and information about their implementation and characterisation. Thus far, this standard has been used to represent designs in homogeneous systems, where the same design is implemented in every cell. In recent years there has been increasing interest in multicellular systems, where biological designs are split across multiple cells to optimise the system behaviour and function. Here we show how the SBOL standard can be used to represent such multicellular systems, and hence how researchers can better share designs with the community.