Modeling Systems Biology from the point of view of Discrete and Hybrid Systems

The research areas at the intersection of biology, computer science, and applied mathematics are all well established at this point in time; they all comprise what is nowadays called systems biology [1], intended as the discipline interested in identifying emergent behavior from the complex interactions of various biological systems. Yet, these interdisciplinary areas seem still in need of absorbing and applying the deepest results and the most advanced techniques coming from their originating fields. In particular, the development of models of biological systems poses questions of scale that are nowadays at the frontier of our software and hardware computing capabilities. Such questions pertain both the representation issues and the pure computational issues. The representation issue arises when the discussion turns to the actual languages and formalisms (the ontologies, cfr. [2], [3]) used to describe and exchange biological models of the genome and of the proteome and their - often discrete - behavior. The computational issues arise when we are faced with the need to treat models of systems comprising a large number of variables, either for formal treatment via reachability analysis or for simulation speed to perform parameter space sweeps (e.g., see [4]). The proposed session gathers contributions that will extend our knowledge of these issues with the goal of advancing our understanding at the core of systems biology.