A Calculus of Looping Sequences for Modelling Microbiological Systems

The paper presents the Calculus of Looping Sequences (CLS) suitable to describe microbiological systems and their evolution. The terms of the calculus are constructed by basic constituent elements and operators of sequencing, looping, containment and parallel composition. The looping operator allows tying up the ends of a sequence, thus creating a circular sequence which can represent a membrane. We show that a membrane calculus recently proposed can be encoded into CLS. We use our calculus to model interactions among bacteria and bacteriophage viruses, and to reason on their properties