The 14th international meeting on DNA computation took place in the Czech Republic in Prague, June 2-9, 2008. During the last 14 years the DNA C- puting meetings have been the key forum at the boundary between computer science, biochemistry and nanotechnology where the most recent results have been presented and their authors have met. Their scienti?c program includes mathematical foundations and theoretical study of DNA computing - or b- computing in general- and recent experimental results in DNA nanotechnology, nanoscience and nanocomputing. It continues to be one of the most exciting interdisciplinary meetings, as exempli?ed by the diverse nature of contributions in this volume. The meeting began with tutorial talks by Friedrich Simmel ("Molecular - ology for Computer Scientists"), Nadrian Seeman ("Structural DNA Nanote- nology"), and Yasubumi Sakakibara ("Formal Grammars for DNA Compu- tion and Bioinformatics"). During the meeting, a number of excellent keynote speakers gave an up-to-date overview of di?erent aspects of DNA computing and biochemical information processing. Luca Cardelli talked about "Molecules as Automata," while Niles Pierce gave an exciting talk entitled "Molecular Choreography-ProgrammingNucleicAcidSelf-AssemblyandDisassemblyPa- ways."Inamorebiologicaltalk, LauraLandweberdiscussed"RNA-Guided, E- geneticProgrammingandRe-programmingofGenomicInformationinCiliates," and Ming Li gave an overview of "Modern Homology Search." The meeting was concluded by a Nanoday with beautiful presentations by Christof Niemeyer, Kurt Gothelf, Andrew Ellington and David Pine.

Why is the question of the di?erence between living and non-living matter - tellectually so attractive to the man of the West? Where are our dreams about our own ability to understand this di?erence and to overcome it using the ?rmly established technologies rooted? Where are, for instance, the cultural roots of the enterprises covered nowadays by the discipline of Arti?cial Life? Cont- plating such questions, one of us has recognized [6] the existence of the eternal dream of the man of the West expressed, for example, in the Old Testament as follows: . . . the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being (Genesis, 2. 7). This is the dream about the workmanlike act of the creation of Adam from clay, about the creation of life from something non-living, and the con?dence in the magic power of technologies. How has this dream developed and been converted into a reality, and how does it determine our present-day activities in science and technology? What is this con?dence rooted in? Then God said: "Let us make man in our image. . . " (Genesis, 1. 26). Man believes in his own ability to repeat the Creator's acts, to change ideas into real things, because he believes he is godlike. This con?dence is - using the trendy Dawkins' term - perhaps the most important cultural meme of the West.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Membrane Computing, CMC 2014, held in Prague, Czech Republic, in August 2014. The 19 revised selected papers presented together with 5 invited lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from 24 papers presented at the conference. In addition, two papers selected from the 22 papers presented at the regional version of CMC, the Asian Conference on Membrane Computing , ACMC 2014, held in Coimbatore, India, are included. The papers cover a wide range of topics in the area of membrane computing, which is an area of computer science aiming to abstract computing ideas and models from the structure and the functioning of living cells, as well as from the way the cells are organized in tissues or higher order structures.