The Computational Universality of Metabolic Computing

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that metabolic systems are computationally universal, providing theoretical foundations, translation rules for algorithms, and a software tool to facilitate system design in synthetic biology.

Contribution

It establishes the Turing-equivalence of metabolic systems and introduces methods and tools for translating algorithms into metabolic P systems.

Findings

Metabolic systems are Turing-universal.

Rules for translating algorithms into metabolic P systems.

A software tool for automatic translation.

Abstract

System and synthetic biology are rapidly evolving systems, but both lack tools such as those used in engineering environments to shift the their focus from the design of parts (details) to the design of systems (behaviors); to aggravate, there are insufficient theoretical justifications on the computational limits of biological systems. To diminish these deficiencies, we present theoretical results over the Turing-equivalence of metabolic systems, defines rules for translations of algorithms into metabolic P systems and presents a software tool to assist the task in an automatic way.