The control community has made significant contributions 
to the field of systems biology, bringing rigorous tools 
from dynamic systems, feedback, modeling and robustness 
analysis. These contributions range from elegant theories 
to explain principles of regulation, to more technological 
developments that advance the state of treatments and 
therapies.  The field has reached a certain level of 
maturity in both tools and applications that make the 
timing opportune for a special issue capturing its 
current state of development. Accordingly, this special 
issue of Automatica will address the state of the art in 
theories, tools, and applications of control to systems 
biology. Among the topics to be covered in the special 
issue are:
- Robustness in gene regulatory networks
- Information processing in signal transduction cascades
- Control architectures that shed light on biological 
  regulation
_ Multiple scales of length and time in biophysical 
  networks
- Network inference and problems of model identification
- Synchronization phenomena in coupled oscillators at 
  the cellular and subcellular level
- Control principles that led to novel approaches to 
  drug target identification
- Novel approaches to biomarkers in complex biophysical 
  models
- Applications of control principles to specific disease 
  problems (with clinical or experimental studies)
 
High quality papers on topics listed above, or related 
ones, are invited for publication in the Special Issue.  

The timetable is:
Submission Deadline:	        February 1, 2010
Tentative Publication Date:	March 2011

The Special Issue will be prepared by a team consisting 
of guest editor, Francis J. Doyle III, and Automatica 
Editor Frank Allgöwer.

Prospective authors should submit their contributions 
by February 1, 2010 via the Automatica web-based paper 
handling system, available at http://www.autsubmit.com.  
Submissions can be in either full paper format or brief 
paper format.  They should be submitted as a Special 
Issue Paper to Special Issue Corresponding Editor 
Frank Doyle only.

Frank Allgower
Automatica Editor for
Process and Computer Control

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*********************************************************
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Frank Allgower
Institute for Systems Theory and Automatic Control
University of Stuttgart
Pfaffenwaldring 9
70550 Stuttgart
Germany

Tel. +49-711-685-67733
Fax. +49-711-685-67735
email. [log in to unmask]
http://www.ist.uni-stuttgart.de