Biological Grammars and Genomic Dictionaries: 11 Years of research in Verona

The talk is a scientific summary of my research in Verona, during the period 2002-2012. It is based on two central chapters of the book "V. Manca, Infobiotics: Information in Biotic Systems, 2013, Springer".
In the first part, the main ideas of MP grammars will be presented for the solution of dynamical inverse problems (based on multiset grammars, recurrent equations, linear algebra, and statistical regression). Then, their recent application to the analysis of gene expressions in cancer cells is sketched, which allowed us to discover an unknown gene regulation mechanism in breast cancer (data from Karmanos Cancer Institute of Detroit). In the second part, a recent research line will be outlined, which is based on an informational analysis of genomes, by means of dictionaries and related indexes. The style of the presentation will be informal and developed according to a historical perspective, following the personal research trajectory, the formation of my research group in Verona, and the history of the research problems in the context of discrete modeling of biological phenomena.