The SBOL Stack: A Platform for Storing, Publishing, and Sharing Synthetic Biology Designs.
Recently, synthetic biologists have developed the Synthetic Biology Open Language (SBOL), a data exchange standard for descriptions of genetic parts, devices, modules, and systems. The goals of this standard are to allow scientists to exchange designs of biological parts and systems, to facilitate the storage of genetic designs in repositories, and to facilitate the description of genetic designs in publications. In order to achieve these goals, the development of an infrastructure to store, retrieve, and exchange SBOL data is necessary. To address this problem, we have developed the SBOL Stack, a Resource Description Framework (RDF) database specifically designed for the storage, integration, and publication of SBOL data. This database allows users to define a library of synthetic parts and designs as a service, to share SBOL data with collaborators, and to store designs of biological systems locally. The database also allows external data sources to be integrated by mapping them to the SBOL data model. The SBOL Stack includes two Web interfaces: the SBOL Stack API and SynBioHub. While the former is designed for developers, the latter allows users to upload new SBOL biological designs, download SBOL documents, search by keyword, and visualize SBOL data. Since the SBOL Stack is based on semantic Web technology, the inherent distributed querying functionality of RDF databases can be used to allow different SBOL stack databases to be queried simultaneously, and therefore, data can be shared between different institutes, centers, or other users.
School of Computing Science, Newcastle University , Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, U.K.|Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Boston University , Boston, Massachusetts 02215, United States.
Curtis
C
Madsen
School of Computing Science, Newcastle University , Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, U.K.
James Alastair
JA
McLaughlin
School of Computing Science, Newcastle University , Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, U.K.
Göksel
G
Mısırlı
School of Computing Science, Newcastle University , Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, U.K.|Turing Ate My Hamster, LTD , Newcastle upon Tyne NE27 0RT, U.K.
Matthew
M
Pocock
School of Computing Science, Newcastle University , Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, U.K.
Keith
K
Flanagan
School of Computing Science, Newcastle University , Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, U.K.
Jennifer
J
Hallinan
School of Computing Science, Newcastle University , Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, U.K.
Anil
A
Wipat
D003628:Database Management Systems; D016208:Databases, Factual; D011381:Programming Languages; D011643:Publishing; D058615:Synthetic Biology
RDF; Synthetic Biology Open Language (SBOL); data standards; database; synthetic biology; triplestore