Rewriting Theory for the Life Sciences: A Unifying Theory of CTMC Semantics

Abstract: The Kappa biochemistry and the M{\O}D organo-chemistry frameworks are amongst the most intensely developed applications of rewriting theoretical methods in the life sciences to date. A typical feature of these types of rewriting theories is the necessity to implement certain structural constraints on the objects to be rewritten (a protein is empirically found to have a certain signature of sites, a carbon atom can form at most four bonds, ...). In this paper, we contribute to the theoretical foundations of these types of rewriting theory a number of conceptual and technical developments that permit to implement a universal theory of continuous-time Markov chains (CTMCs) for stochastic rewriting systems. Our core mathematical concepts are a novel rule algebra construction for the relevant setting of rewriting rules with conditions, both in Double- and in Sesqui-Pushout semantics, augmented by a suitable stochastic mechanics formalism extension that permits to derive dynamical evolution equations for pattern-counting statistics.