Abstract
The family of stichotrichous ciliates contains several single-celled organisms possessing a unique genetic mechanism: the ability to descramble genes which exist in a scrambled state in their genomes. We continue the theoretical investigation of the iterated template-guided recombination operation. This operation is suggested by the recombination of DNA strands based on template guides proposed by Prescott, Ehrenfeucht and Rozenberg. A variety of results is demonstrated including a study of computational power, characterizations and other abstract properties, such as a "pumping lemma". The notion of a useful template is defined and forms a critical basis for much of the results demonstrated in the paper. The main result shows that every full AFL is closed under iterated template-guided recombination with regular templates.
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Daley, M., McQuillan, I. Useful Templates and Iterated Template-Guided DNA Recombination in Ciliates. Theory Comput Syst 39, 619–633 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00224-005-1206-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00224-005-1206-6