Abstract Motivated by the intriguing complexity of biochemical circuitry within individual cells we study Stochastic Chemical Reaction Networks (SCRNs), a formal model that considers a set of chemical reactions acting on a finite number of molecules in a well-stirred solution according to standard chemical kinetics equations. SCRNs have been widely used for describing naturally occurring (bio)chemical systems, and with the advent of synthetic biology they become a promising language for the design of artificial biochemical circuits. Our interest here is the computational power of SCRNs and how they relate to more conventional models of computation. We survey known connections and give new connections between SCRNs and Boolean Logic Circuits, Vector Addition Systems, Petri nets, Gate Implementability, Primitive Recursive Functions, Register Machines, Fractran, and Turing Machines. A theme to these investigations is the thin line between decidable and undecidable questions about SCRN behavior.
The computational power of Chemical Reaction Networks, viewed as a programming language for engineering biochemical systems, has been studied by a number of authors, to mention REF and .
Programmability of chemical reaction networks
Caltech Parallel and Distributed Systems Group [http://caltechparadise.library.caltech.edu/perl/oai2] (United States), 2008. In submission
Computer Science