Formal Verification for Natural and Engineered Biological Systems

Computational modeling is now used effectively to complement experimental work in biology, allowing to identify gaps in our understanding of the biological systems studied, and to predict system behavior based on a mechanistic model. We provide an overview of several areas in biology for which formal verification has been successfully used. We highlight examples from both natural and engineered biological systems. In natural biological systems the main goal is to understand how a system works and predict its behavior, whereas for engineered biological systems the main goal is to engineer biological systems for new purposes, e.g. for building biology-based computational devices. We compare between the challenges in applying formal verification in biology and the application to traditional domains. Finally, we outline future research directions and opportunities for formal verification experts to contribute to the field.