Introducing the SBOL Industrial Consortium

We're officially announcing the launch of the SBOL Industrial Consortium today, which makes me very happy.

This is something that's been a long time coming: there's a number of us at companies that are using, invested in, or interested in SBOL. Pretty much every synthetic biology company grapples with the problems that SBOL aims to solve, and either we have to roll our own or else we need to make sure that something is out there that's close enough to our needs to make it work. Or, as I like to put it: if SBOL didn't exist, we'd have to invent something very much like it anyway.

But most of the development to date has been done by universities, and there there are things that are just plain hard to do on a model of grant-based funding of development by graduate students. To bring things to the next level, and ensure a stable base of shared infrastructure, we need industry involvement, and the goal of the SBOL Industrial Consortium is to organize and coordinate the interested industrial players in a free and open context, where all of us can benefit both in industry and in academia and in government.

The SBOL Industrial Consortium first really nucleated in hallway discussions at the SEED Synthetic Biology conference last year. From then until now was a few months of discussions to figure out who was interested and the principles for organization, then about six months getting the legal framework set up, and then a couple of months getting the founding members sorted out, arranging finances, and bootstrapping up our organization.

SBOL Industrial Consortium logo and founding members

We've got a nice strong founding team, and we've got some nice press in SynBioBeta and  PLOS to help announce our launch. Next step: making sure that we're able to really work together and help each other out in a way that makes it worth it for us all. If it works, I expect that the consortium will grow naturally and organically from here.

One way or another though: as all of us companies working in synthetic biology grow and need to exchange more information about what we're doing in synthetic biology in our business transactions, something like the SBOL Industrial Consortium needs to exist. I'm happy to be helping try to keep that in the open and non-proprietary space, and have confidence that we've a good shot at being able to make something useful work.