Theoretical Computer Science
On the expressive power of recursion, replication and iteration in process calculi
Mathematical Structures in Computer Science
On the computational power of brane calculi
Transactions on Computational Systems Biology VI
Programming in Biomolecular Computation
Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (ENTCS)
Strand algebras for DNA computing
Natural Computing: an international journal
Modelling, simulating and verifying turing-powerful strand displacement systems
DNA'11 Proceedings of the 17th international conference on DNA computing and molecular programming
Computational biology: a programming perspective
Formal modeling
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We explore the expressive power of languages that naturally model biochemical interactions relative to languages that only naturally model basic chemical reactions, identifying molecular association as the basic mechanism that distinguishes the former from the latter. We use a process algebra, the Biochemical Ground Form (BGF), that adds primitives for molecular association to CGF, which is a process algebra that has been proved to be equivalent to the traditional notations for describing basic chemical reactions. We first observe that, unlike CGF, BGF is Turing universal as it supports a finite precise encoding of Random Access Machines, which comprise a well-known Turing powerful formalism. Then we prove that the Turing universality of BGF derives from the interplay between the molecular primitives of association and dissociation. In fact, the elimination from BGF of the primitives already present in CGF does not reduce the computational strength of the process algebra, but if either association or dissociation is removed, BGF ceases to be Turing complete.