link of the paper: Chen et al., 2012

Abstract

Chemical reaction networks (CRNs) formally model chemistry in a well-mixed solution. A CRN is a finite set of reactions such as X + Y → X + Z among abstract molecular species, each describing a rule for transforming reactant molecules into product molecules. CRNs are widely used to describe information processing occurring in natural cellular regulatory networks, and with upcoming advances in synthetic biology, CRNs are a promising language for the design of artificial biochemical circuits. Nevertheless, despite the extensive use of CRNs in the natural sciences, the range of computational behaviours exhibited by CRNs is not well understood. Here, we intend to discuss the computational power of CRNs in deterministic computations. We are going to characterize the class of functions that is deterministically computable by CRNs and describe how fast the functions of this class can be constructed.