Conference: Participant Support for COMBINE 2015 to be held in Salt Lake City, UT on October 12-16, 2015

University Of Utah, Salt Lake City UT

Investigators

Abstract

Standards for data exchange are critical to the development of any field. They enable researchers and practitioners to exchange information reliably, apply a variety of tools to their problems, and reproduce scientific results. This is a project to support a workshop on this topic in October, 2015 to be held in Salt Lake City, Utah. The meeting is organized by the COmputational MOdeling in BIology NEtwork (COMBINE), which was created in 2010 to organize standardization efforts for systems biology. The request if for participant costs to enable students and junior scientist attend the meeting. They will learn will learn valuable lessons in the importance of research and tool standardization and the impact of a community-wide effort. This effort is essential for areas of systems and synthetic biology and translational research where to be seamless. The meetings will specifically explore data exchange standards for biology to enable researchers and practitioners to exchange information reliably, apply a variety of tools to their problems, and reproduce scientific results. The discussion will center, among others, on the systems biology markup language (SBML) for mathematical modeling, the biological pathways exchange language (BioPaX) for describing pathways, the systems biology graphical notation (SBGN) for visual representations, and the synthetic biology open language(SBOL) for describing biological designs. While synthetic biology data exchange has many unique requirements, there are also many overlapping goals such as the need to construct mathematical models, describe pathways, and provide visual representations. Therefore, it is highly beneficial to join these efforts, such that, the synthetic biology community can leverage existing standards enabling the sharing of tools and other infrastructure. Likewise, the other communities will benefit from renewed discussions around data exchange and synthetic biology's unique process of forward engineering living systems.