The common ancestors of today’s humans and today’s chimpanzees presumably lived several million years ago. Then, due to genetic mutuations and/or changes
0 2e+07 4e+07 6e+07 8e+07 1e+08 1.2e+08 1.4e+08 1.6e+08
0 10 20 30 40 50 60
pM
minutes
simulation real data
0 2e+07 4e+07 6e+07 8e+07 1e+08 1.2e+08 1.4e+08 1.6e+08
0 10 20 30 40 50 60
pM
minutes
simulation real data
Fig. 4.Sorbitol dehydrogenase: concentrations of NADH with time varying. Simula-tions (solid lines) are compared with real experiments (dashed lines). The graph on the top corresponds to Setting A, while the graph on the bottom corresponds to Setting B.
in the environment, the population split into the ancestors of humans and the ancestors of chimpanzees. Such a separation of one species into two is called
“speciation”. It is easily explained if the two populations live in separate envi-ronments, like one on an island and the other on a continent, making the mating of males from one population with females from the other population impossible.
This effect is called allopatric speciation. More difficult to explain is sympatric speciation, where the two populations continue to live in the same environment but nevertheless cease to mate each other.
Some computer model have recently appeared in the physics and biology literatures for experimenting hypothesis on the reasons of sympatric speciation [25][29]. As a future work, we would like to apply to this problem one of the variants of MSR we introduced in Section 2.
6 Conclusions
In this Ph.D. thesis proposal we have described the state of the art in the mod-elling of biochemical systems with formalisms origianally developed to describe concurrent interactive systems. In this field we have considered the issue of mod-elling quantitative aspects of biological systems and, to this purpose, we have proposed some probabilistic extensions of a model based on multiset rewriting.
We have shown how one of the proposed extensions can be applied in particu-lar to phenomena related to biochemistry and we have reported some results of simulation of real enzymatic activity that we have compared to results of real experiments. Moreover, we have discussed the problem of verifying properties of biological systems by using techniques very common in computer science but practically unknown in biology as model checking, static analisys and formal reasoning.
For the future, we expect to develop more expressive models and some ve-rification techniques for biological systems, and to apply them to some different fields of biology.
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