Abstract
Watson-Crick Automata are a counterpart of finite automata working on a Watson-Crick tape composed of double stran-ded sequences of symbols linked by a complementarity relation like DNA molecules. Consequently, these devices have as input double strands of strings of symbols arranged in a pairwise affinity similar to Watson-Crick complementarity given by the pairs of nucleotides (A, T) and (C, G) of the DNA alphabet. They have been created in order to investigate the behaviour of DNA molecules.Parallel Communicating Finite Automata Systems are accepting devices composed of two or more finite automata that work in parallel in a synchronized manner, communicating states to each other by request. The protocol of collaboration is controlled by the so-called query symbols. They impose restrictions in the communication process (they specify which automaton has to provide its current state to the automaton that asked for the information). Depending on this protocol several variants of parallel communicating finite automata systems have been introduced in the literature, e.g. returning or not returning, centralized or not.In this paper we prove that Watson-Crick automata and parallel communicating finite automata systems with two components are equivalent from a computational point of view. This statement does not depend on the type of the system protocol. We use this result in solving two open problems that concern the characterization of recursively enumerable languages with parallel communicating devices. Several examples, given at the end of the paper, illustrate possible application of the above systems in DNA computing, more exactly in the process of gene assembly in ciliates.
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