A Formal Language for Computational Systems Biology

The post-genomic era has opened new insights into the complex biochemical reaction systems present in the cell and has generated huge amount of information. The biological systems are highly complex and can overwhelm the numerically computable models. Therefore, models employing symbolical techniques might provide a faster insight. This paper presents some preliminary results and recent trends in the above direction. Specifically, it presents an overview of the main features of some formalisms and techniques from the field of specification languages for concurrency and mobility, which have been proposed to model and simulate the dynamics of the interaction of complex biological systems. The ultimate goal of these symbolic approaches is the modeling, analysis, simulation, and hopefully prediction of the behavior of biological systems (vs. biological components).