A Flat Process Calculus for Nested Membrane Interactions

The link-calculus has been recently proposed as a process calcu-
lus for representing interactions that are open (i.e. that the number
of processes may vary), and multiparty (i.e. that may involve more
than two processes). Here, we apply the link-calculus for expressing,
possibly hierarchical and non dyadic, biological interactions. In par-
ticular, we provide a natural encoding of Cardelli's Brane calculus, a
compartment-based calculus, introduced to model the behaviour of
nested membranes. Notably, the link-calculus is
at, but we can
model membranes just as special processes taking part in the biological
reaction. Moreover, we give evidence that the link-calculus allows one
to directly model biological phenomena at the more appropriate level
of abstraction.