Pathway analysis for BioAmbients

Systems Biology aims for a holistic understanding of biological processes. In order to make this understanding operational and testable it can be recorded into formal process calculus models. This is a difficult task, however, because such formal models and their, often infinitely many, consequences are hard to enumerate and understand. In this paper we define a pathway analysis, based on static analysis techniques from programming languages, and show how it can be used to establish useful, finite, approximations to the set of causal consequences of models. The Pathway Analysis can be used to great advantage in all phases of the modelling approach – serving as the basis of debugging during model development, postdiction during model validation, and, finally, prediction during model guided drug design.