The database side of bio was initiatied in April 2005 with BioModels, the world's first database of annotated biological models. BioModels was the result of collaboration by the European Bioinformatics Institute (UK), the SBML Team, an international group that develops opensource standards to describe biological systems. Other contributors include the Keck Graduate Institute (USA), the Systems Biology Institute (Japan) and Stellenbosch University (South Africa).

The SBGN project was launched on the heels of BioModels in 2005 and it  was a united effort to specifically develop a new graphical standard for molecular and systems biology applications.

The project was initiated by (left) Hiroaki Kitano (Systems Biology Institute, Tokyo, Japan) and coordinated by (below left) Nicolas Le Novère (EMBL-EBI, Hinxton, UK) and (right) Michael Hucka (California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA).

The team comprises biochemists, modellers and computer scientists who have developed the SBGN in collaboration with the systems biology research community.

Le Novère said: "In the genomics era, especially since the emergence of high-throughput technologies, there have been massive increases in the amount of biological data. We believe that the SBGN will make it easier for researchers to understand each other's models and to share this data more effectively. This will benefit systems biologists working on a variety of biochemical processes, including gene regulation, metabolism and cellular signalling."

To ensure the new visual language does not become too vast and complex, the researchers decided to define three separate types of diagram that complement each other, describing molecular processes, relationships between entities and links among biochemical activities.

Simplicity, combined with the extensive involvement of the community of researchers that will use SBGN, should ensure that the notation is rapidly adopted and widely used.

The European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) is part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) based on the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus in Hinxton near Cambridge (UK). It grew out of EMBL's pioneering work in providing public biological databases to research communities and hosts some of the world's most important collections of biological data, including DNA sequences (EMBL-Bank), protein sequences (UniProt), animal genomes (Ensembl), 3D structures (the Protein Databank in Europe), data from gene expression experiments (ArrayExpress), protein-protein interactions (IntAct) and pathway information (Reactome). The EBI hosts several research groups and its scientists continually develop new tools for the biocomputing community.

The European Molecular Biology Laboratory is a basic research institute funded by public research monies from 20 member states (Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom) and associate member state Australia.