Solving Vertex Cover Problem Using DNA Tile Assembly Model

DNA tile assembly models are a class of mathematically distributed and parallel biocomputing models in DNA tiles. In previous works, tile assembly models have been proved be Turing-universal; that is, the system can do what Turing machine can do. In this paper, we use tile systems to solve computational hard problem. Mathematically, we construct three tile subsystems, which can be combined together to solve vertex cover problem. As a result, each of the proposed tile subsystems consists ofΘ(1) types of tiles, and the assembly process is executed in a parallel way (like DNA’s biological function in cells); thus the systems can generate the solution of the problem in linear time with respect to the size of the graph.