Bounded Asynchrony: Concurrency for Modeling Cell-Cell Interactions

We introduce bounded asynchrony, a notion of concurrency tailored to the modeling of biological cell-cell interactions. Bounded asynchrony is the result of a scheduler that bounds the number of steps that one process gets ahead of other processes; this allows the components of a system to move independently while keeping them coupled. Bounded asynchrony accurately reproduces the experimental observations made about certain cell-cell interactions: its constrained nondeterminism captures the variability observed in cells that, although equally potent, assume distinct fates. Real-life cells are not "scheduled", but we show that distributed real-time behavior can lead to component interactions that are observationally equivalent to bounded asynchrony; this provides a possible mechanistic explanation for the phenomena observed during cell fate specification. We use model checking to determine cell fates. The nondeterminism of bounded asynchrony causes state explosion during model ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: FMSB
• Authors: Jasmin Fisher, Thomas A. Henzinger, Maria Mateescu, Nir Piterman
• Keywords: Biological Cell-cell Interactions, Cell-cell Interactions, Certain Cell-cell Interactions, FMSB 2008, Formal Methods