Three Dimensional DNA Self-Assembly Model for the Minimum Vertex Cover Problem

DNA self-assembly technology has brought novel inspiration to the development of DNA computing. Diversified computational models based on DNA self-assembly have been used to solve various NP problems. In this paper, a three-dimensional (3D) DNA self-assembly model is presented to solve the minimum vertex cover problem. With the capacity of DNA molecules in massive parallel computation, the model can simulate a non-deterministic algorithm and solve the problem in polynomial time. Meanwhile, the computation space of the model is O(n3) and the number of distinct tiles is O(1).