Transactions on Computational Systems Biology X

Technology is taking us to a world where myriads of heavily networked devices interact with the physical world in multiple ways, and at many levels, from the globalInternetdowntomicroandnanodevices. Manyofthesedevicesarehighly mobile and autonomous and must adapt to the surrounding environment in a totally unsupervised way. A fundamental research challenge is the design of robust decentralized c- puting systemsthat arecapableofoperating in changing environmentsandwith noisy input, and yet exhibit the desired behavior and response time, under c- straints such as energy consumption, size, and processing power. These systems should be able to adapt and learn how to react to unforeseen scenarios as well as to display properties comparable to social entities. The observation of nature has brought us many great and unforeseen concepts. Biological systems are able to handle many of these challenges with an elegance and e?ciency far beyond currenthumanartifacts. Basedonthisobservation,bio-inspiredapproacheshave been proposed as a means of handling the complexity of such systems. The goal is to obtain methods to engineer technical systems, which are of a stability and e?ciency comparable to those found in biological entities. This Special Issue on Biological and Biologically-inspired Communication contains the best papers from the Second International Conference on Bio- Inspired Models of Network, Information, and Computing Systems (BIONET- ICS 2007). The BIONETICS conference aims to bring together researchers and scientistsfromseveraldisciplines incomputerscienceandengineeringwhereb- inspired methods are investigated, as well as from bioinformatics, to deepen the information exchange and collaboration among the di?erent communities.