Molecular biotechnology now makes it possible to build elaborate systems models, but the systems biology community needs information standards if models are to be shared, evaluated and developed cooperatively.
RESULTS
We summarize the Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML) Level 1, a free, open, XML-based format for representing biochemical reaction networks. SBML is a software-independent language for describing models common to research in many areas of computational biology, including cell signaling pathways, metabolic pathways, gene regulation, and others.
BACKGROUND
The specification of SBML Level 1 is freely available from http://www.sbml.org/