FUNCTIONS DEFINED BY REACTION SYSTEMS
Reaction systems are a formal model of interactions between biochemical reactions. They consist of sets of reactions, where each reaction is classified by its set of reactants (needed for the reaction to take place), its set of inhibitors (each of which prevents the reaction from taking place), and its set of products (produced when the reaction takes place) - the set of reactants and inhibitors form the resources of the reaction. Each reaction system defines a (transition) function on its set of states. (States here are subsets of an a priori given set of biochemical entities.) In this paper we investigate properties of functions defined by reaction systems. In particular, we investigate how the power of defining functions depends on available resources, and we demonstrate that with small (r)esources one can define functions exhibiting complex behavior.
reaction systems resources natural computing models of biochemistry