Ranks of Strictly Minimal Reaction Systems Induced by Permutations

Abstract Reaction system is a computing model inspired by the biochemical interaction taking place within the living cells. Various extended or modified frameworks motivated by biological, physical, or purely mathematically considerations have been proposed and received significant amount of attention, notably in the recent years. This study, however, takes after particular early works that concentrated on the mathematical nature of minimal reaction systems in the context-free basic framework and motivated by a recent result on the sufficiency of strictly minimal reaction systems to simulate every reaction system. This paper focuses on the largest reaction system rank attainable by strictly minimal reaction systems, where the rank pertains to the minimum size of a functionally equivalent reaction system. Precisely, we provide a very detailed study for specific strictly minimal reaction system induced by permutations, up to the quaternary alphabet. Along the way, we obtain a general result about reaction system rank for Cartesian product of functions specified by reaction systems.