Computational Thinking in Biology

The paper presents a new approach based on process calculi to systems modeling suitable for biological systems. The main characteristic of process calculi is a linguistic description level to dene incrementally and compositionally executable models. The formalism is suitable to be exploited on the same systems at dierent levels of abstractions connected through well dened formal rules. The abstraction principle that represents biological entities as interacting computational units is the basis of the computational thinking that can help biology to unravel the functions of the cell machinery. We discuss then the perspectives that process calculi can open to life sciences and the impact that this can in turn produce on computer science. This is the preliminary version of a paper that was published in Transactions on Computational Systems Biology. The original publication is available at http://www.springerlink.com/content/p2246002t2568021/