December 3rd, 2025

[ERIK-KE]

Participants

Prashant Vaidyanathan
Chris Myers
Goksel Misirli
Gonzalo Vidal Pena
Felipe Buson
Carolus Vitalis
Lukas Buecherl
Erik Kubaczka

Topics

• SBOL Visual Reports on 2024 Papers in ACS SynBio
• Website
• Governance
• Conferences (Harmony and IWBDA)

SBOL Visual

We reported the status of reviewing the 2024 Papers in ACS SynBio for the SBOL Visual status report. All remaining months for 2024 are distributed and shall be completed in the next weeks.

Website

New parts of the website are currently not accessible.

Governance

Lukas' 3 year SBOL Editor term did end and we have to elect a new SBOL Editor. We discussed potential candidates and procedures for the election in case only a single candidate is open for the vote.

Currently SEPs are created and should be finalized till spring next year.

Harmony 2026

One session of Harmony 2026 (2 - 5 February 2026) is on reviewing the 2025 year paper's in ACS SynBio with respect to SBOL Visual use and application of Best Practices and Compliance rules.

Another session should be on reviewing papers to evaluate whether SBOL documents can be created to support the paper. This should bring insights into whether some steps are missing, how supportive scripts can be created and more. Chris suggests to identify the papers that should be considered already prior to Harmony. A particular focus should be put on papers that describe part libraries or papers that extensively use parts or circuits. Furthermore, we should focus on creating complete libraries instead of considering too many papers.

Further discussion focused on the process on how we should curate part libraries, which includes the SBOL version to use. An important aspect is that we currently can share only SBOL2 files via SynBioHub. Files created in SBOL3 could be created to SBOL2 via the converter.
For SBOL2, we have many tools supporting the curation of part libraries. Using SBOL3 has the advantage of identifying bottlenecks in the creation of part libraries with SBOL3.

A compromise would be to use pySBOL3 and relatives when we use code to curate part libraries. On the other side, if existing tools support the creation of part libraries, then it is also fine to create SBOL2 files.

The in person attendance of SBOL people at Harmony is likely to be low. We therefore have to organize virtual breakout rooms and have to sync on the time zones. Ideally, we can find groups of people in the same timezone to help make the curation part libraries most effective.

We should discuss this further at the next Steering Committee meeting. Prashant suggests that Chris gives a walkthrough on how to curate part libraries.

IWBDA 2026

IWBDA takes place right after SEED 2026 (June 13-14, 2026 (Tutorials), June 18-20, 2026 (Workshop)). As hosted in Denver, registration fees can be low but still should lead to revenue. As such, sponsorship can mostly focus on travel grants and similar.