Working group at ACI Vicanne meeting,
Nice, Jan 20/21, 2005
coordinated by Celine Kuttler
Recommended readings:
Pi calculus in biology:
Introduction: The
pi calculus as an abstraction for biomolecular systems by A.Regev
and E. Shapiro (2004). This self-contained book chapter (50
pages) motivates the use of the pi-calculus for the modelling of
biological systems, and gives a number of examples together with
illustrative graphics. The variant of pi presented is based on Priami's
stochastic pi
calculus. Note that this does not represent a formal
introduction into pi-calculi.
for a formal overview of pi-calculus syntax &
semantics
I recommend the first sections of CHAPTER 2 of Martin
Berger's thesis (2004). Note that previous background in logics or
lambda calculi helps.
for completeness, a reference to Robin
Milner's book "Communicating and Mobile Systems: the Pi-Calculus"
(1999). Great investment!
Pi calculus tools:
Two tools for the execution of stochastic pi calculus models have
been proposed so far:
BioSpi - the biochemical stochastic pi system (since 2001/2)
Excercise sheet to work with during the workhop: [discussion material PDF]
Pre-workshop excercises for the workshop, and prior to
it if there is time and interest.
Try to plug into BioSpi and run!
execute it with: record(FILE#"System"(N,M), log.txt, time)
where N and M are suitable values for the number of
molecules to start with (check examples for arity). Try values in the
order of
tens up to hundreds.
log.txt will be used for output
time: how many simulated seconds you want to run. Be
modest, try small values. :-)
use the "spi2t" script from the directory
yourBioSpi/Aspic-release/bin/ to convert the log file into a table with
the system state recorded once per second (1 line per second)
you may visualize the result using your favorite statistics
tool for plotting (gnuplot, Gnumeric, R, Excel).