Interactomes, manufacturomes and relational biology: analogies between systems biology and manufacturing systems

AbstractBackgroundWe review and extend the work of Rosen and Casti who discuss category theory with regards to systems biology and manufacturing systems, respectively.ResultsWe describe anticipatory systems, or long-range feed-forward chemical reaction chains, and compare them to open-loop manufacturing processes. We then close the loop by discussing metabolism-repair systems and describe the rationality of the self-referential equationf=f(f). This relationship is derived from some boundary conditions that, in molecular systems biology, can be stated as the cardinality of the following molecular sets must be about equal: metabolome, genome, proteome. We show that this conjecture is not likely correct so the problem of self-referential mappings for describing the boundary between living and nonliving systems remains an open question. We calculate a lower and upper bound for the number of edges in the molecular interaction network (the interactome) for two cellular organisms and for two manufacturomes for CMOS integrated circuit manufacturing.ConclusionsWe show that the relevant mapping relations may not be Abelian, and that these problems cannot yet be resolved because the interacto