Systems Biology Graphical Notation

[1] SBGN is made up of three orthogonal languages for representing different views of biological systems: Process Descriptions, Entity Relationships and Activity Flows.

Each language defines a comprehensive set of symbols with precise semantics, together with detailed syntactic rules regarding the construction and interpretation of maps.

[3] The SBGN Process Description (PD) language shows the temporal courses of biochemical interactions in a network.

It omits information about the state transitions of entities and is particularly convenient for representing the effects of perturbations, whether genetic or environmental in nature.

The meeting that initiated development of the Systems Biology Graphical Notation took place on February 11–12, 2006, at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), in Tokyo, Japan.