systems biology

Biology studies living systems, where processes are concurrent, distributed, and continuously self-adjust in respond to stimulus.

 

There is an agreement about the need for frameworks, with both enough expressive power as to model this kind of scenario and conceptual simplicity to allow reasoning about these highly complex situations; one could further argue that this is the basic goal of systems biology.

 

These frameworks have also to be flexible, integrating different types of processes, and be able to admit a profound level of detail and a global perspectivewithin the same system.

 

This the motivation behind our research, which focus on the development of mathematical frameworks capable of meeting these needs:

 

(higher) category theory and biological processes
we strongly believe that category theory is a promising conceptual framework for the modeling of biological processes and systems. Recently, we presented these ideas at Sysbiol 2008. As an application, we are working on the modeling of quorum sensing in Vibrio harveyi.