ON THE SPLICING OPERATION

We propose here a systematic formal study of the splicing operation in troduced by Head as a model of recombinant behavior of DNA. We conside r both simple and iterated splicing, with respect to a finite or an in finite set of splicing rules, in the latter case the whole set of rule s constituting a regular language. Relations between these operations and usual operations with languages are investigated, as well as the c losure of Chomsky language families under these splicing operations. A series of open problems are formulated too.