  The 4th Workshop on Membrane Computing and Biologically Inspired Process
Calculi (MeCBIC 2010) is organized in Jena as a satellite event of the Eleventh
International Conference on Membrane Computing (CMC11). Biological membranes
play a fundamental role in the complex reactions which take place in cells of
living organisms. The importance of this role has been considered in two
different types of formalisms introduced recently. Membrane systems were
introduced as a class of distributed parallel computing devices inspired by the
observation that any biological system is a complex hierarchical structure,
with a flow of biochemical substances and information that underlies their
functioning. The modeling and analysis of biological systems has also attracted
considerable interest of the process algebra research community. Thus the
notions of membranes and compartments have been explicitly represented in a
family of calculi, such as ambients and brane calculi. A cross fertilization of
these two research areas has recently started. A deeper investigation of the
relationships between these related formalisms is interesting, as it is
important to understand the crucial similarities and the differences. The main
aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers working on membrane
computing, in biologically inspired process calculi, and in other related
fields, in order to present recent results and to discuss new ideas concerning
such formalisms, their properties and relationships.
