This book explains the state-of-the-art algorithms used to simulate biological dynamics. Each technique is theoretically introduced and applied to a set of modeling cases. Starting from basic simulation algorithms, the book also introduces more advanced techniques that support delays, diffusion in space, or that are based on hybrid simulation strategies. This is a valuable self-contained resource for graduate students and practitioners in computer science, biology and bioinformatics. An appendix covers the mathematical background, and the authors include further reading sections in each chapter.

A practice-oriented survey of techniques for computational modeling and simulation suitable for a broad range of biological problems. There are many excellent computational biology resources now available for learning about methods that have been developed to address specific biological systems, but comparatively little attention has been paid to training aspiring computational biologists to handle new and unanticipated problems. This text is intended to fill that gap by teaching students how to reason about developing formal mathematical models of biological systems that are amenable to computational analysis. It collects in one place a selection of broadly useful models, algorithms, and theoretical analysis tools normally found scattered among many other disciplines. It thereby gives the aspiring student a bag of tricks that will serve him or her well in modeling problems drawn from numerous subfields of biology. These techniques are taught from the perspective of what the practitioner needs to know to use them effectively, supplemented with references for further reading on more advanced use of each method covered. The text, which grew out of a class taught at Carnegie Mellon University, covers models for optimization, simulation and sampling, and parameter tuning. These topics provide a general framework for learning how to formulate mathematical models of biological systems, what techniques are available to work with these models, and how to fit the models to particular systems. Their application is illustrated by many examples drawn from a variety of biological disciplines and several extended case studies that show how the methods described have been applied to real problems in biology.

This issue on Computational Models for Cell Processes is based on a workshop that took place in Turku, Finland, May 2008. The papers span a mix of approaches to systems biology, ranging from quantitative techniques to computing paradigms inspired by biology.

LNCS 5945

This volume, the 7th in the Transactions on Computational Systems Biology series, contains a fully refereed and carefully selected set of papers from two workshops: BioConcur 2004 held in London, UK in August 2004 and BioConcur 2005 held in San Francisco, CA, USA in August 2005. The 8 papers chosen for this special issue are devoted to various aspects of computational methods, algorithms, and techniques in bioinformatics.

The LNCS journal Transactions on Computational Systems Biology is devoted to inter- and multidisciplinary research in the fields of computer science and life sciences. It supports a paradigmatic shift in the techniques from computer and information science to cope with the new challenges arising from the systems oriented point of view of biological phenomena. The six papers selected for this special issue cover a broad range of topics.

Technology is taking us to a world where myriads of heavily networked devices interact with the physical world in multiple ways, and at many levels, from the globalInternetdowntomicroandnanodevices. Manyofthesedevicesarehighly mobile and autonomous and must adapt to the surrounding environment in a totally unsupervised way. A fundamental research challenge is the design of robust decentralized c- puting systemsthat arecapableofoperating in changing environmentsandwith noisy input, and yet exhibit the desired behavior and response time, under c- straints such as energy consumption, size, and processing power. These systems should be able to adapt and learn how to react to unforeseen scenarios as well as to display properties comparable to social entities. The observation of nature has brought us many great and unforeseen concepts. Biological systems are able to handle many of these challenges with an elegance and e?ciency far beyond currenthumanartifacts. Basedonthisobservation,bio-inspiredapproacheshave been proposed as a means of handling the complexity of such systems. The goal is to obtain methods to engineer technical systems, which are of a stability and e?ciency comparable to those found in biological entities. This Special Issue on Biological and Biologically-inspired Communication contains the best papers from the Second International Conference on Bio- Inspired Models of Network, Information, and Computing Systems (BIONET- ICS 2007). The BIONETICS conference aims to bring together researchers and scientistsfromseveraldisciplines incomputerscienceandengineeringwhereb- inspired methods are investigated, as well as from bioinformatics, to deepen the information exchange and collaboration among the di?erent communities.