Biomodel Engineering - From Structure to Behavior

Biomodel engineering is the science of designing, constructing and analyzing computational models of biological systems. It forms a systematic and powerful extension of earlier mathematical modeling approaches and has recently gained popularity in systems biology and synthetic biology. In this brief review for systems biologists and computational modelers, we introduce some of the basic concepts of successful biomodel engineering, illustrating them with examples from a variety of application domains, ranging from metabolic networks to cellular signaling cascades. We also present a more detailed outline of one of the major techniques of biomodel engineering – Petri net models – which provides a flexible and powerful tool for building, validating and exploring computational descriptions of biological systems.