This is the first monograph on computation in living cells - one of the central and fastest growing areas of research in this field. Gene assembly in ciliates (unicellular organisms) is a splendid example of such computations. This work has helped to clarify important biological aspects of gene assembly, yielded novel insights into the nature of computation, and broadened our understanding of what computation is about. The monograph gives an accessible account of both the biology and the formal analysis of the gene assembly process. It can be used as a textbook for either graduate courses or seminars.

Autorentext

Prof. Rozenberg is multiple Springer author/editor of, e.g., the LNCS series Advances in Petri Nets, of ICALP proceedings, of "DNA Computing - New Computing Paradigms" by George Paun, Grzegorz Rozenberg, Arto Salomaa, of the "Handbook of Formal Languages" edited by Grzegorz Rozenberg, Arto Salomaa (3 volumes). Rozenberg is also founding editor of the EATCS Texts and Monographs Series and the Natural Computing Series.

Inhalt

1 An Overview of the Cell.- 2 Ciliates.- 3 Molecular Operations for Gene Assembly.- 4 Model Forming.- 5 Mathematical Preliminaries.- 6 MDS Arrangements and MDS Descriptors.- 7 MDS Descriptor Pointer Reduction System.- 8 Legal Strings.- 9 String Pointer Reduction System.- 10 Overlap Graphs.- 11 Graph Pointer Reduction System.- 12 Invariants.- 13 Patterns of Subsets of Rules.- 14 Gene Assembly Through Cyclic Graph Decomposition.- 15 Intermolecular Model.- 16 Discussion.- References.