Operations and language generating devices suggested by the genome evolution (Q5958327)

Language-theoretic problems arising from the genome evolution discussed in series of papers of the authors, Proc. 2nd Pacific Symp. on Biocomputing, World Scientific, Singapore, 1997, pp. 97-108; Bioinformatics, Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. 1278, 199-209; BioSystems 43, 169-177 (1997); Jewels are Forever, Springer, Berlin, 1999, pp. 171-181) are presented in a uniform way. The main emphasis is on the operations of inversion, transposition, duplication and deletion suggested by the genome evolution. Basic problems concerning these operations and their iterated versions are settled. A generative device (evolutionary grammar) based on these operations is investigated from different points of view (computational power, decidability problems, descriptional complexity). ``Adult languages'' (sets of stable strings) of such evolutionary grammars possess a surprising generative power.