The Capacity of String-Duplication Systems

It is known that the majority of the human genome consists of duplicated sequences. Furthermore, it is believed that a significant part of the rest of the genome also originated from duplicated sequences and has mutated to its current form. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of constructing an exponentially large number of sequences from a short initial sequence using simple duplication rules, including those resembling genomic-duplication processes. In other words, our goal is to find the capacity, or the expressive power, of these string-duplication systems. Our results include exact capacities, and bounds on the capacities, of four fundamental string-duplication systems. The study of these fundamental biologically inspired systems is an important step toward modeling and analyzing more complex biological processes.