A Calculus of Looping Sequences for Modelling Microbiological Systems

Abstract

Abstract. The paper presents a new calculus suitable to describe microbiological systems and their evolution. We use the calculus to model interactions among bacteria and bacteriophage viruses, and to reason on their properties. 1 Introduction In the past few years a notable research effort has been devoted to formallydescribe biological processes by using means originally developed by computer scientists to model systems of interacting components. This permits simulationof system behaviour and verification of properties. Among the many formalisms that have been applied to biology there are Petri Nets [9], Hybrid Systems [1],and the ss-calculus [12, 7]. Moreover, some new formalisms have been proposedto describe biomolecular and membrane interactions [2, 4-6, 8, 11].