Computation in Living Cells

Natural Computing is concerned with computation that is taking place in Nature. The investigation of computations in living cells is 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, and it is fascinating from both the biological and the computational viewpoints. As a matter of fact, both biology and the science of computation have benefited from the interdisciplinary research on the computational nature of gene assembly – 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.

This 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.

• Ciliates
• Computational molecular biology
• DNA computing
• Gene assembly
• Natural computing
• Theory of computation
• biology
• genes

• Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA

  Andrzej Ehrenfeucht

• Department of Mathematics, University of Turku, Turku, Finland

  Tero Harju

• Department of Computer Science, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland

  Ion Petre

• Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA

  David M. Prescott

• Leiden Institute for Advanced Computer Science, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

  Grzegorz Rozenberg

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.

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