The successful use of process calculi to specify behavioural models allows us to compare RNA and protein folding processes from a new perspective. We model the folding processes as behaviours resulting from the interactions that nucleotides and amino acids (the elementary units that compose RNAs and proteins respectively) perform on their linear sequences. This approach is intended to provide new knowledge about the studied systems without strictly relying on empirical data. By applying Milner’s CCS process algebra to highlight the distinguishing features of the two folding processes, we discovered an abstraction level at which they show behavioural equivalences. We believe that this result could be interpreted as a clue in favour of the highly-debated RNA World theory, according to which, in the early stages of cell evolution, RNA molecules played most of the functional and structural roles carried out today by proteins.
A recent study on the immunotherapy treatment of renal cell carcinoma reveals better outcomes in obese patients compared to lean subjects. This enigmatic contradiction has been explained, in the context of the debated obesity paradox, as the effect produced by the cell-cell interaction network on the tumor microenvironment during the immune response. To better understand this hypothesis, we provide a computational framework for the in silico study of the tumor behavior. The starting model of the tumor, based on the cell-cell interaction network, has been described as a multiagent system, whose simulation generates the hypothesized effects on the tumor microenvironment. The medical needs in the immunotherapy design meet the capabilities of a multiagent simulator to reproduce the dynamics of the cell-cell interaction network, meaning a reaction to environmental changes introduced through the experimental data.
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