On the Ontology Based Representation of Cell Lines

Cell lines are frequently used as highly standardized and reproducible in vitro models for biomedical analyses and assays. Cell lines are distributed by cell banks that operate databases describing their products. However, the description of the cell lines' properties are not standardized across different cell banks. Existing cell line-related ontologies mostly focus on the description of the cell lines' names, but do not cover aspects like the origin or optimal growth conditions. The objective of this work is to develop an ontology that allows for a more comprehensive description of cell lines and their metadata, which should cover the data elements provided by cell banks. This will provide the basis for the standardized annotation of cell lines and corresponding assays in biomedical research. In addition, the ontology will be the foundation for automated evaluation of such assays and their respective protocols in the future. To accomplish this, a broad range of cell bank databases as well as existing ontologies were analyzed in a comprehensive manner. We identified existing ontologies capable of covering different aspects of the cell line domain. However, not all data fields derived from the cell banks' databases could be mapped to existing ontologies. As a result, we created a new ontology called cell culture ontology (CCONT) integrating existing ontologies where possible. CCONT provides classes from the areas of cell line identification, origin, cell line properties, propagation and tests performed.