Sticker systems with complex structures

Abstract

 In this paper, we propose a variant of sticker systems which uses molecules with complex structures. Since the original sticker systems (Paun et al. (1998) [2, 8]) working on double strands of DNA have been studied as a formal model for self-assembly in DNA computing, we extend the sticker systems to working on more complex (higher-order) structures of DNA molecules. The advantage of sticker systems with complex structures is that augmented with weak codings we can obtain the characterization of recursively enumerable languages by using only sticking (hybridization) operations for complex molecules, while the usual sticker systems require more complicated operations such as the simultaneous use of couples of dominoes or coherent computations besides morphisms.