On the computational power of genetic gates with interleaving semantics: the power of inhibition and degradation

  • Authors:
  • Nadia Busi;Claudio Zandron

  • Affiliations:
  • Dipartimento di Scienze dell'Informazione, Universit` di Bologna, Bologna, Italy;DISCo, Universit` di Milano-Bicocca, Milano, Italy

  • Venue:
  • FCT'07 Proceedings of the 16th international conference on Fundamentals of Computation Theory
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Genetic Systems are a formalism inspired by genetic regulatory networks, suitable for modeling the interactions between genes and proteins, acting as regulatory products. The evolution is driven by genetic gates: a new object (representing a protein) is produced when all activator objects are available in the system, and no inhibitor object is present. Activators are not consumed by the application of such a rule. Objects disappear because of degradation: each object is equipped with a lifetime, and the object decays when such a lifetime expires. We investigate the computational expressiveness of Genetic Systems with interleaving semantics (a single action is executed in a computational step): we show that they are Turing equivalent by providing a deterministic encoding of Random Access Machines in Genetic Systems. We also show that the computational power strictly decreases when moving to Genetic Systems where either the degradation or the inhibition mechanism are absent.