Formalization Of Transcription And Translation Processes By Turing Machines

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Date

2015

Type of Work

Department

Computer Science and Bioinformatics Program

Program

Master of Science

Citation of Original Publication

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This item is made available by Morgan State University for personal, educational, and research purposes in accordance with Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. Other uses may require permission from the copyright owner.

Abstract

The human nuclear genome consists of a set of 23 pairs of chromosomes which is made of long DNA molecules that contain information bytes called genes. The human genome contains about 21,000 genes. In the cell, each of the genes codes for a specific protein and is assigned a specific function. Transcription and translation are the processes used by cells to produce a string of amino acids that is a foundation of protein. Transcription: Transcription occurs in the nucleus where the cell copies the gene sequence into messenger RNA (mRNA). This is the first step of gene expression where a complementary DNA sequence is produced. Translation: The ribosome which consists of RNA and proteins reads the mRNA sequence and translates it into the amino acid sequence of the protein. The ribosome reads three nucleotides at a time. Each three-nucleotide codon specifies a particular amino acid. The nucleotide triplets are "stop" codons (UAA, UAG, and UGA) that signal the ribosome that the protein is complete. The goals and accomplishments in this research are: • Design Turing machines to simulate the famous transcription and translation problem • Formally describe the transcription and translation problem using Turing machines terminology (states, rules) • Implement unrestricted grammar (a type 0 grammar) that defines/specifies the language of transcription and translation processes. • Compute the complexity of the transcription and translation problem. The final solution is the composition of over forty Visual Turing machines. This research is very important because this is one of the first successful attempts to describe biochemical processes in a formal way and move biology from an experimental science into a computational science.