SyQUAL: a Platform for Qualitative Modelling and Simulation of Biological Systems

Qualitative modelling in systems biology is increasingly adopted as it allows predicting important properties of biological systems even when quantitative information of such systems are unknown. Even though different tools for qualitative modelling have been recently proposed, their lack of automatism and their unstructured simulation core limit their applicability to non-complex biological networks. This paper presents SyQUAL, a platform for qualitative modelling and simulation of biological systems. It consists of two main layers: a Web-based framework that allows users to (i) import models described in the standard Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML), (ii) easily define properties to observe, and (iii) run simulations by hiding the underlying layer, that is, a SystemC-based core simulator that allows simulating the systems through a discrete event-based model of computation at different levels of details. The paper shows how SyQUAL has been applied to identify the attractors and to analyse the system robustness/sensitivity under perturbations of the Colitis-associated Colon Cancer (CAC) network.