Natural Computing is concerned with computation that is taking place in Nature. The investigation of computations in living cells is one of the central and fastest growing areas of research in this field. Gene assembly in ciliates (unicellular organisms) is a splendid example of such computations, and it is fascinating from both the biological and the computational viewpoints. As a matter of fact, both biology and the science of computation have benefited from the interdisciplinary research on the computational nature of gene assembly - this work has helped to clarify important biological aspects of gene assembly, yielded novel insights into the nature of computation, and broadened our understanding of what computation is about.

This monograph gives an accessible account of both the biology and the formal analysis of the gene assembly process. It can be used as a textbook for either graduate courses or seminars.

1 An Overview of the Cell

2 Ciliates
3 Molecular Operations for Gene Assembly
4 Model Forming
5 Mathematical Preliminaries
6 MDS Arrangements and MDS Descriptors
7 MDS Descriptor Pointer Reduction System
8 Legal Strings
9 String Pointer Reduction System
10 Overlap Graphs
11 Graph Pointer Reduction System
12 Invariants
13 Patterns of Subsets of Rules
14 Gene Assembly Through Cyclic Graph Decomposition
15 Intermolecular Model
16 Discussion
References.