Scientific Impact
The Cell Behavior Ontology is an enabling technology that will permit standardized annotation of experimental data ranging from wet-lab results, such as developmental biology experiments or clinical pathology data, to computational models of those experiments. Multi-scale modeling and model sharing and reuse will be the major benefactors of the successful development of the CBO. Linking CBO and CBMSL with existing standards for model description at the molecular level (SBML, Cell ML) will create an integrated suite of standards capable of describing in great detail a much broader range of biological systems than is currently possible.
The successful linking of the Systems Biology standards with CBO will allow us to describe in a unified fashion models in which cell behaviors are parameterized based on the state of the internal metabolic network thus creating truly multi scale model which, for example, would allow one to study the effects of how perturbations taking place at molecular level affect patterning at the tissue level. While such models do exist currently, they are usually hard coded and therefore nearly impossible to share with a broad community ranging from modelers to clinicians.