Modelling, property verification and behavioural equivalence of lactose operon regulation

  • Authors:

  • Marcelo Cezar Pinto;Luciana Foss;José Carlos Merino Mombach;Leila Ribeiro

  • Affiliations:

  • Instituto de Informática, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil;Instituto de Informática, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil;Laboratório de Bioinformática e Biologia Computacional, Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos, São Leopoldo, RS, Brasil;Instituto de Informática, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil

  • Venue:
  • Computers in Biology and Medicine
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Understanding biochemical pathways is one of the biggest challenges in the field of molecular biology nowadays. Computer science can contribute in this area by providing formalisms and tools to simulate and analyse pathways. One formalism that is suited for modelling concurrent systems is Milner's Calculus of Communicating Systems (CCS). This paper shows the viability of using CCS to model and reason about biochemical networks. As a case study, we describe the regulation of lactose operon. After describing this operon formally using CCS, we validate our model by automatically checking some known properties for lactose regulation. Moreover, since biological systems tend to be very complex, we propose to use multiple descriptions of the same system at different levels of abstraction. The compatibility of these multiple views can be assured via mathematical proofs of observational equivalence.