The Equivalence between Biology and Computation

A major challenge in computational systems biology is the articulation of a biological process in a form which can be understood by the biologist yet is amenable to computational execution. Process calculi have proved to especially powerful computational tools for modelling and reasoning about biological processes and we have previously described, and implemented, a Narrative approach to describing biological models which is a biologically intuitive high level language that can be translated into executable process calculus programs. Here we discuss an extension to the narrative approach which attempts to directly link biological data with Narrative primitives by suggesting an equivalence relationship between a string (the amino acid sequence) and a process. We outline future challenges in applying this approach more generally.