Hybrid and generalized marked systems

Abstract The circular splicing operation is a language-theoretic operation introduced by Head to model biological phenomena on circular DNA and RNAs. It acts on pairs of circular words under conditions defined by a set of rules. A circular splicing system S is defined by giving an initial set of circular words and a set of rules. S represents a circular language from a generative point of view (splicing language). There are open questions related to the computational power of these systems. For instance, a characterization of circular splicing systems generating regular circular languages is still lacking as well as a characterization of the structure of the regular splicing languages. In this paper we give results about these questions for a special class of hybrid systems named generalized marked systems.