Brane Calculi Systems: A Static Preview of their Possible Behaviour

We improve the precision of a previous Control Flow Analysis for Brane Calculi, by adding information on the context and introducing causality information on the membranes. This allows us to prove some biological properties on the behaviour of systems specified in Brane Calculi.Comment: Presented at MeCBIC 201

A Process Calculus for Molecular Interaction Maps

We present the MIM calculus, a modeling formalism with a strong biological basis, which provides biologically-meaningful operators for representing the interaction capabilities of molecular species. The operators of the calculus are inspired by the reaction symbols used in Molecular Interaction Maps (MIMs), a diagrammatic notation used by biologists. Models of the calculus can be easily derived from MIM diagrams, for which an unambiguous and executable interpretation is thus obtained. We give a formal definition of the syntax and semantics of the MIM calculus, and we study properties of the formalism. A case study is also presented to show the use of the calculus for modeling biomolecular networks.Comment: 15 pages; 8 figures; To be published on EPTCS, proceedings of MeCBIC 200

Formal executable descriptions of biological systems

The similarities between systems of living entities and systems of concurrent processes may support biological experiments in silico. Process calculi offer a formal framework to describe biological systems, as well as to analyse their behaviour, both from a qualitative and a quantitative point of view. A couple of little examples help us in showing how this can be done. We mainly focus our attention on the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the considered biological systems, and briefly illustrate which kinds of analysis are possible. We use a known stochastic calculus for the first example. We then present some statistics collected by repeatedly running the specification, that turn out to agree with those obtained by experiments in vivo. Our second example motivates a richer calculus. Its stochastic extension requires a non trivial machinery to faithfully reflect the real dynamic behaviour of biological systems

A Type System for a Stochastic CLS

The Stochastic Calculus of Looping Sequences is suitable to describe the evolution of microbiological systems, taking into account the speed of the described activities. We propose a type system for this calculus that models how the presence of positive and negative catalysers can modify these speeds. We claim that types are the right abstraction in order to represent the interaction between elements without specifying exactly the element positions. Our claim is supported through an example modelling the lactose operon

Process Calculi Abstractions for Biology

Several approaches have been proposed to model biological systems by means of the formal techniques and tools available in computer science. To mention just a few of them, some representations are inspired by Petri Nets theory, and some other by stochastic processes. A most recent approach consists in interpreting the living entities as terms of process calculi where the behavior of the represented systems can be inferred by applying syntax-driven rules. A comprehensive picture of the state of the art of the process calculi approach to biological modeling is still missing. This paper goes in the direction of providing such a picture by presenting a comparative survey of the process calculi that have been used and proposed to describe the behavior of living entities. This is the preliminary version of a paper that was published in Algorithmic Bioprocesses. The original publication is available at http://www.springer.com/computer/foundations/book/978-3-540-88868-

A framework for protein and membrane interactions

We introduce the BioBeta Framework, a meta-model for both protein-level and membrane-level interactions of living cells. This formalism aims to provide a formal setting where to encode, compare and merge models at different abstraction levels; in particular, higher-level (e.g. membrane) activities can be given a formal biological justification in terms of low-level (i.e., protein) interactions. A BioBeta specification provides a protein signature together a set of protein reactions, in the spirit of the kappa-calculus. Moreover, the specification describes when a protein configuration triggers one of the only two membrane interaction allowed, that is "pinch" and "fuse". In this paper we define the syntax and semantics of BioBeta, analyse its properties, give it an interpretation as biobigraphical reactive systems, and discuss its expressivity by comparing with kappa-calculus and modelling significant examples. Notably, BioBeta has been designed after a bigraphical metamodel for the same purposes. Hence, each instance of the calculus corresponds to a bigraphical reactive system, and vice versa (almost). Therefore, we can inherith the rich theory of bigraphs, such as the automatic construction of labelled transition systems and behavioural congruences