Combining Insertion and Deletion in RNA-editing Preserves Regularity
H. Zantema, E.P. de Vink and D. Bosnacki 
                                                                               
Inspired by RNA-editing as occurs in transcriptional processes in the living
cell, we introduce an abstract notion of string adjustment, called guided
rewriting. This formalism allows simultaneously inserting and deleting
elements. We prove that guided rewriting preserves regularity: for every
regular language its closure under guided rewriting is regular too. This
contrasts an earlier abstraction of RNA-editing separating insertion and
deletion for which it was proved that regularity is not preserved. The
particular automaton construction here relies on an auxiliary notion of slice
sequence which enables to sweep from left to right through a completed rewrite
sequence.