Computational Theory of Biological Function I

Abstract

This series presents an approach to mathematical biology which makes precise the function of biological molecules. Because biological systems compute, the theory is a general purpose computer language. I build a language for efficiently representing the function of protein-like molecules in a cell. The first paper only presents the kinematic part of the formalism, but this is already useful for representing large-scale protein networks. The full formalism allows us to investigate the properties of protein interaction models, ultimately yielding an estimate of the random-access memory of the proteins, a measure of their capacity for computation.