Communicating Structure and Function in Synthetic Biology Diagrams

Our new paper, "Communicating Structure and Function in Synthetic Biology Diagrams," has just been accepted in ACS Synthetic Biology, and is up online in their collection of just-accepted-manuscripts. This article provides a nice summary and introduction of how to draw genetic systems diagrams that are unambiguous and easy to understand.

Example diagram illustrating SBOL Visual, highlighting all the types of glyphs that are used in diagrams.

If you can't get at this article behind the ACS paywall, you can also find a nice slide show introducing SBOL Visual on our website or get the material in long form in the full SBOL Visual 2.1 specification.  If you can get at the paper, though, I definitely recommend it, as it has some nice examples showing how this can be used not just for circuits but for pretty much any synthetic biology project, including metabolic engineering and large-scale genome editing and insertions.  It's also got some newly accepted material (e.g., proteins no longer look like yeast "shmoos") that's available online but won't be bundled into a specification release until 2.2 (which is likely 6-12 months away).

I hope you'll find SBOL Visual useful and adopt these methods for all of your illustrations and tools. Now that we've got a good emerging graphical standard that's easy to use in most illustration tools, I see no reason for anyone to avoid embracing it.  And if you run into obstacles or have suggestions for how to improve the standard---get in touch! It's an open community process, and we've had lots of good stuff come in from people joining the community over time!