This course builds on a colloquium on 24th January (http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/events). The 3-day course will be self-contained and will address both the biological and computational aspects of the reaction systems.
ABSTRACT: Natural Computing is an interdisciplinary field of research that investigates human-designed computing inspired by nature as well as computation taking place in nature, i.e., it investigates models, computational techniques, and computational technologies inspired by nature as well as it investigates phenomena/processes taking place in nature in terms of information processing. One of the research areas from the second strand of research is the computational nature of biochemical reactions. It is hoped that this line of research may contribute to a computational understanding of the functioning of the living cell, which is based on interactions between (a huge number of) individual reactions. These reactions are regulated, and the main regulation mechanisms are facilitation/acceleration and inhibition/retardation. The interactions between individual reactions take place through their influence on each other, and this influence happens through these two mechanisms. In our lecture we present a formal framework for the investigation of processes carried by biochemical reactions. We motivate this framework by explicitly stating a number of assumptions that hold for a great number of biochemical reactions, and we point out that these assumptions are very different from the ones underlying traditional models of computation. We discuss some basic properties of processes carried by biochemical reactions, and demonstrate how to capture and analyse, in our formal framework, some biochemistry related notions. Besides providing a formal framework for reasoning about processes instigated by biochemical reactions, the models discussed in the lecture are novel and attractive from the (theoretical) computer science point of view.
published on: 24th December 2010