Closure properties of bonded sequential insertion-deletion systems

Abstract

Through the years, formal language theory has evolved through continual interdisciplinary work in theoretical computer science, discrete mathematics and molecular biology. The combination of these areas resulted in the birth of DNA computing. Here, language generating devices that usually considered any set of letters have taken on extra restrictions or modified constructs to simulate the behavior of recombinant DNA. A type of these devices is an insertion-deletion system, where the operations of insertion and deletion of a word have been combined in a single construct. Upon appending integers to both sides of the letters in a word, bonded insertion-deletion systems were introduced to accurately depict chemical bonds in chemical compounds. Previously, it has been shown that bonded sequential insertion-deletion systems could generate up to recursively enumerable languages. However, the closure properties of these systems have yet to be determined. In this paper, it is shown that bonded sequential insertion-deletion systems are closed under union, concatenation, concatenation closure, λ-free concatenation closure, substitution and intersection with regular languages. Hence, the family of languages generated by bonded sequential insertion-deletion systems is shown to be a full abstract family of languages.