Editorial: Computing with biomolecules

Abstract

This special issue contains extended full versions of selected papers presented at the International Workshop on Computing with Biomolecules held on August 27, 2008, in Vienna, Austria, in conjunction with the 7th International Conference on Unconventional Computation, UC 2008. The topic of the workshop, and of this journal issue, lies within molecular and cellular computing, with special emphasis on membrane computing. The articles represent different approaches and cover a wide variety of research topics in these rapidly developing scientific areas, ranging from models of properties of DNA to different variants of P systems, i.e., membrane systems. Additionally, one paper belonging to the general area of biocomputing was submitted specifically for this special journal issue. All contributions were thoroughly refereed and revised, according to the usual standards of Natural Computing Below we provide a summary of each of the seven papers featured in the special issue. The articles are listed in alphabetical order according to the first author. In the first paper, Bogdan Aman and Gabriel Ciobanu consider a new class of membrane systems (P systems), characterized by mutual mobile membranes with objects on the surface. The rules of this class are inspired by the pino, exo and phago operations. The authors investigate the computational power of this class of P systems and establish universality results already with a small number of membranes. In the last section the model is compared with brane calculi. Mark Daley, Ian McQuillan, James M. McQuillan and Kalpana Mahalingam study formal-language-theoretic models for transposable genetic elements. The aim of their work is to improve our understanding of mathematical modeling of transpositions. The genetic transpositions are abstracted as operations on words and languages and the authors investigate the computational power of applying different types of transpositions iteratively.