The computational power of cell-like P systems with one protein on membrane

Abstract

P systems with proteins on membranes are biologically-inspired distributed parallel computing models, where a multiset of proteins is associated with a membrane. In this paper, we propose a variant of such systems, in this case with one protein on a membrane, where only one protein is placed on a membrane, and such protein can either change or not change when the corresponding evolution rule is used. This novel variant of membrane systems is named P systems with one protein on membrane. The computational power of such kind of systems is studied. We prove that the proposed P systems using two membranes and only one protein per membrane are universal if different types of rules are assembled in an appropriate way. These results show that membrane proteins play a crucial role to achieve the Turing completeness in cell-like P systems with one protein on membrane framework.