One of the papers in the Royal Society Interface special issue on synthetic biology takes a look at the potential for a standard graphical notation for engineers working on system design. As one of the authors is Hiroaki Kitano, the proposal, naturally is for the Systems Biology Graphical Notation (SBGN) coupled with the Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML).
The authors concede that SBGN may need extensions to handle the constructs that synthetic biology engineers want to use but argue:
"Sharing of symbols representing identical biological elements would further help in developing a common graphical lingua franca for biological engineering, on the same lines as in electrical circuit diagrams and other advanced engineering disciplines.
"We strongly believe that careful collaboration on the visual as well as model representation aspects between the two communities would foster the development of a standard graphical notation schema and accelerate the application of computational techniques."
However, one lesson from electrical engineering is that graphical languages do not last long. Circuit diagrams cope well with simple analogue and digital circuits in electronics but as soon as things get complex, text tends to win out. Just look at the way in which textual languages such as Verilog and VHDL pushed graphical schematics to the margins. The textual representations also deal with the idea of parallel operation better. And in synthetic biology, it all happens in parallel.
