Related papers: Reducibility of Gene Patterns in Ciliates using th…
Gene assembly in ciliates is an extremely involved DNA transformation process, which transforms a nucleus, the micronucleus, to another functionally different nucleus, the macronucleus. In this paper we characterize which loop recombination…
The biological process of gene assembly has been modeled based on three types of string rewriting rules, called string pointer rules, defined on so-called legal strings. It has been shown that reduction graphs, graphs that are based on the…
DNA rearrangement processes recombine gene segments that are organized on the chromosome in a variety of ways. The segments can overlap, interleave or one may be a subsegment of another. We use directed graphs to represent segment…
Formal models for gene assembly in ciliates have been developed, in particular the string pointer reduction system (SPRS) and the graph pointer reduction system (GPRS). The reduction graph is a valuable tool within the SPRS, revealing much…
Gene assembly is an intricate biological process that has been studied formally and modeled through string and graph rewriting systems. Recently, a restriction of the general (intramolecular) model, called simple gene assembly, has been…
We consider principal pivot transform (pivot) on graphs. We define a natural variant of this operation, called dual pivot, and show that both the kernel and the set of maximally applicable pivots of a graph are invariant under this…
Gene conversion is a mechanism by which a double-strand break in a DNA molecule is repaired using a homologous DNA molecule as a template. As a result, one gene is 'copied and pasted' onto the other gene. It was recently reported that the…
Genome rearrangements can be modeled as $k$-breaks, which break a genome at k positions and glue the resulting fragments in a new order. In particular, reversals, translocations, fusions, and fissions are modeled as $2$-breaks, and…
We describe a graph reduction operation, generalizing three graph reduction operations related to gene assembly in ciliates. The graph formalization of gene assembly considers three reduction rules, called the positive rule, double rule,…
The Watson-Crick complementary properties of DNA make DNA a useful tool for the self-assembly of various target complexes. Concepts from graph theory can be used to model the self-assembling process in which the vertices of the graph…
DNA self-assembly is an important tool that has a wide range of applications such as building nanostructures, the transport of target virotherapies, and nano-circuitry. Tools from graph theory can be used to encode the biological process of…
The formation of DNA loops by proteins and protein complexes that bind at distal DNA sites plays a central role in many cellular processes, such as transcription, recombination, and replication. Here we review the basic thermodynamic…
During the course of evolution, an organism's genome can undergo changes that affect the large-scale structure of the genome. These changes include gene gain, loss, duplication, chromosome fusion, fission, and rearrangement. When gene gain…
De novo genome assembly focuses on finding connections between a vast amount of short sequences in order to reconstruct the original genome. The central problem of genome assembly could be described as finding a Hamiltonian path through a…
Breakpoint graphs are ubiquitous structures in the field of genome rearrangements. Their cycle decomposition has proved useful in computing and bounding many measures of (dis)similarity between genomes, and studying the distribution of…
The transport of macromolecules, such as DNA, through the cytoskeleton is critical to wide-ranging cellular processes from cytoplasmic streaming to transcription. The rigidity and steric hindrances imparted by the network of filaments…
We propose a partitioning of the set of unlabelled, connected cubic graphs into two disjoint subsets named genes and descendants, where the cardinality of the descendants is much larger than that of the genes. The key distinction between…
Motivated by the question of how macromolecules assemble, the notion of an {\it assembly tree} of a graph is introduced. Given a graph $G$, the paper is concerned with enumerating the number of assembly trees of $G$, a problem that applies…
Inspired by biology's most sophisticated computer, the brain, neural networks constitute a profound reformulation of computational principles. Remarkably, analogous high-dimensional, highly-interconnected computational architectures also…
Genomes evolve as modules. In prokaryotes (and some eukaryotes), genetic material can be transferred between species and integrated into the genome via homologous or illegitimate recombination. There is little reason to imagine that the…