TY - JOUR A1 - Bordihn, Henning A1 - Mitrana, Victor A1 - Paun, Andrei A1 - Paun, Mihaela T1 - Hairpin completions and reductions BT - semilinearity properties JF - Natural computing : an innovative journal bridging biosciences and computer sciences ; an international journal N2 - This paper is part of the investigation of some operations on words and languages with motivations coming from DNA biochemistry, namely three variants of hairpin completion and three variants of hairpin reduction. Since not all the hairpin completions or reductions of semilinear languages remain semilinear, we study sufficient conditions for semilinear languages to preserve their semilinearity property after applying the non-iterated hairpin completion or hairpin reduction. A similar approach is then applied to the iterated variants of these operations. Along these lines, we define the hairpin reduction root of a language and show that the hairpin reduction root of a semilinear language is not necessarily semilinear except the universal language. A few open problems are finally discussed. KW - DNA hairpin formation KW - Hairpin completions KW - Hairpin reductions KW - Semilinearity property Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s11047-020-09797-0 SN - 1572-9796 VL - 20 IS - 2 SP - 193 EP - 203 PB - Springer Science + Business Media B.V. CY - Dordrecht ER -