This paper provides a description of the recent evolution in the US of an emerging technology known as DNA Computation or more generally as Biomolecular Computation from its early stages to its development and extension into other areas such as nanotechnology, emerging as a viable sub-discipline of science and engineering.

The intramolecular model (Ehrenfeucht et al, 2001) for gene assembly in ciliates considers three operations, ld, hi, and dlad that can assemble any micronuclear gene pattern through folding and recombination: the molecule is folded so that two occurrences of a pointer (short nucleotide sequence) get aligned and then the sequence is rearranged through recombination of pointers. In general, the sequence rearranged by one operation can be arbitrarily long and may consist of many coding and non-coding blocks. We consider in this paper some restricted variants of the three operations, where only one coding block is rearranged at a time. We present in this paper the molecular model of these simple operations. We also introduce a mathematical model for the simple operations, on three levels of abstractions: MDS descriptors, signed permutations, and signed double occurrence strings. Interestingly, we show that simple assemblies possess rather involved properties: a gene pattern may have both successful and unsuccessful assemblies and also more than one successful strategy.

This paper presents an overview of computational biology approaches and surveys some of the natural computing models using, in both cases, a formal language-based approach.

Abstract not found

Abstract not found

This paper presents an overview of computational biology approaches and surveys some of the natural computing models using, in both cases, a formal language-based