P SYSTEMS WITH PROTEINS ON MEMBRANES: A SURVEY

Abstract

The paper is a survey of the recent model of P systems with proteins on membranes introduced by Păun and Popa in 2006. This model can be viewed as an extension of the highly successful paper of (Păun and Păun 2002) describing P systems based on symport/antiport. The previous model represented an important change of direction from strings to objects in the area of P systems. The main drawback of the model from 2002 was the massive parallelism that is not seen in real life. The 2006 model was a step in controlling the parallelism the same way it is done in nature in symporters and antiporters: these processes take place through protein channels embedded at the level of the membrane which can only be used by a molecule at a time, thus yielding a sequentiality with respect to the number of such proteins embedded in the membrane.