Biomedical subjects

V Mitrana

Publications and source records attributed to V Mitrana.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1997

Context-free evolutionary grammars and the structural language of nucleic acids.

This paper introduces and investigates a generative mechanism based on some operations inspired by the large-scale mutations in genomes (deletion, inversion, transposition, duplication). Basic questions regarding these devices and their generated languages are investigated: generative capacity, closure properties, decidability. We also briefly discuss a few problems concerning our model with respect to some structural features of the nucleic acids.

Evolution, Molecular↗

PubMed1997

On some operations suggested by genome evolution.

Three operations involved in the genome evolution namely, inversion, transposition and duplication, are considered as operations on strings and languages. We show that, for any pair of these operations, there is a language family which is closed under one of the operations and not closed under the second one, however, under some mild conditions the closure of a language family under one of the operations implies that it also closed with respect to another one.

Alternative Splicing↗

PubMedDate not supplied

A computational model for cell differentiation.

In this paper, we present a word set generating mechanism, called cell-differentiation system, inspired by the tissue process formation in multicellular organisms, which might model some properties of evolving communities of living cells at the syntactical level. The tools utilized to model these biological phenomena belong to the formal language theory. In this context chromosomal mutations are defined as operations on strings and the differentiation according to the control of gene expression is represented by some random-context conditions in formal languages. In the presented formal framework we prove that in a simplified form of this formalism, with only one cell-type which is regular, one single cell and no mitosis involved, the problem of establishing whether or not the set of vectors of integers indicating the number of cells in each population, is finite, linear or semilinear, is recursively undecidable. However, one can algorithmically decide whether or not a cell-differentiation system of finite cell-type can produce a specific generation of cells.

Algorithms↗