English

Watson-Crick strong bi-catenation on words

Combinatorics 2025-09-03 v1

Abstract

In this paper we define and investigate the binary word operation of strong-ϕ\phi-bi-catenation (denoted by ϕ\leftrightarrows_\phi) where ϕ\phi is either a morphic or an antimorphic involution. In particular, we concentrate on the mapping ϕ=θDNA\phi=\theta_{DNA}, which models the Watson-Crick complementarity of DNA single strands. We show that such an operation is commutative and not associative and when iteratively applied to a word uu, this operation generates words over {u,θ(u)}\{u, \theta(u)\}. We then extend this operation to languages and show that the families of regular, context-free and context-sensitive languages are closed under the operation of strong-ϕ\phi-bi-catenation. We also define the notion of θ\leftrightarrows_\theta-conjugacy and study conditions on words uu and vv where uu is a θ\leftrightarrows_\theta-conjugate of vv. We then extend this relation to language equations and provide solutions under some special cases.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.00355,
  title  = {Watson-Crick strong bi-catenation on words},
  author = {Kalpana Mahalingam},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.00355},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:13:15.314Z