Biological membranes play a fundamental role in the complex reactions which take place in cells of living organisms. The importance of this role has been considered in two different types of formalisms recently introduced. Membrane systems were introduced as a class of distributed parallel computing devices inspired by the observation that any biological system is a complex hierarchical structure, with a flow of materials and information that underlies their functioning. The emphasis is mainly on the computational properties of the model, and it makes use of automata, languages, and complexity theoretic tools.
The modeling and the analysis of biological systems has also attracted the interest of the process algebra research community. In this setting, the notions of membranes and compartments have been explicitely represented in a family of calculi, such as Ambients and Brane Calculi. The emphasis is mainly on the fidelity to the biological reality, and the main interest is in the systems biology area.
The main aim is to bring together researchers working in membrane computing and in biologically inspired process calculi (ambients, brane calculus, etc.) to present recent research works and to discuss new ideas concerning such formalisms, their properties and relationships.
We also celebrate 10 years of ambients and membrane systems.
Original research papers (including significant work-in-progress), as well as surveys of current research on the relations between membrane systems and biologically inspired process calculi are particularly welcome. Also original contributions on either membrane systems or biologically inspired process calculi are sought.
Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
Authors are invited to submit a PDF version of their papers (of about
14 pages) using the web page
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mecbic2008.
The submissions have to be prepared using LaTeX with ENTCS style
and the macros for MeCBIC located at
http://www.entcs.org/table.html.
After the conference, it is planned to publish selected (and additionally refereed) papers in a special issue of a journal dedicated to MeCBIC 2008.
Past Events: The first edition of MeCBIC was held in Venice in 2006 (co-located with ICALP 2006). One of the organizers of the first MeCBIC was Nadia Busi. We are continuing the series after the tragic loss of Nadia. The proceedings of the first MeCBIC have been also published in the Elsevier ENTCS series (vol.171).