Decision problems for linear and circular splicing systems

We will consider here the splicing systems, generative devicesinspired by cut and paste phenomena on DNA molecules under the actionof restriction and ligase enzymes. A DNA strand can be viewed as a stringover a four letter alphabet (the four deoxyribonucleotides), therefore wecan model DNA computation within the framework of formal languagetheory. In spite of a vast literature on splicing systems, briefly surveyedhere, a few problems related to their computational power are still open.We intend to evidence how classical techniques and concepts in automatatheory are a legitimate tool for investigating some of these problems.