For example, a simple enzyme protein could be viewed as a computational element that takes an input—the concentration of its “substrate,” the molecule with which it interacts—and produces an output: a concentration of the catalyzed reaction product. An enzyme that becomes active only when it binds to two separate regulator molecules will function something like a Boolean AND gate, and so on. Circuits formed from these elements can be as simple as a switch or an oscillator, or as complex as to drive a bacterium’s chemotaxis response. Indeed, the cell even possesses a kind of short-term, “random-access” memory, in the sense that events in its environment have profoundly shaped the concentration and activity of many thousands of molecules in the cell. In short, these protein-based circuits constitute a kind of nervous system for the cell, providing it with much of what it needs to control its behavior. Box 6.2 provides some additional perspective on this subject.

Additional insights can be gained from the notion that both computational processes and biological pathways can be viewed as processes that affect the state of a system according to well-defined (though possibly probabilistic) rules. Thus, it is possible to describe regulatory, metabolic, and signaling pathways, as well as multicellular processes such as immune responses, as systems of interacting computations operating in parallel. In particular, languages such as Petrinets, Statecharts (discussed in Section 4.3.1), and the Pi-calculus, originally developed for the specification and study of systems of interacting computations, can be used to represent such systems.⁸ Such representations enable researchers to simulate their behavior, and to support qualitative and quantitative reasoning on the properties of these systems.

To cite two prominent researchers in this area:

Abstractions of the cell as a computing or information-processing device allow one to distinguish between two conceptual levels: a “low-level” view that focuses on implementation (i.e., how the system is built—where the wires go or the detailed molecular processes involved) and a “high-level” view that focuses on functionality (what the system does—analogous to a logic gate or a computational device).¹⁰ For example, one might distinguish between the pathways involved in regulating the circadian rhythm of an organism and its functional behavior as an oscillator.

The difference between these levels of abstraction enables biologically significant comparisons to be made. For example, it would be instructive if two different organisms implemented the same function in different ways. In other words, functional equivalence between related implementations in different organisms could be regarded as a measure of the behavioral similarity of entire systems. (In the literature of evolutionary biology, the implementation of the same function in different ways is called “analogous” implementation.) Perhaps more importantly, a functional perspective is an enabler for the integration of knowledge about the function, activity, and interaction of cellular molecular systems.