Related papers: Biological Information
Biologists rely heavily on the language of information, coding, and transmission that is commonplace in the field of information theory as developed by Claude Shannon, but there is open debate about whether such language is anything more…
This article introduces the physics of information in the context of molecular biology and genomics. Entropy and information, the two central concepts of Shannon's theory of information and communication, are often confused with each other…
Information is a key concept in evolutionary biology. Information is stored in biological organism's genomes, and used to generate the organism as well as to maintain and control it. Information is also "that which evolves". When a…
In the 21st century, many of the crucial scientific and technical issues facing humanity can be understood as problems associated with understanding, modelling, and ultimately controlling complex systems: systems comprised of a large number…
Biology has taken strong steps towards becoming a computer science aiming at reprogramming nature after the realisation that nature herself has reprogrammed organisms by harnessing the power of natural selection and the digital prescriptive…
We consider biological individuality in terms of information theoretic and graphical principles. Our purpose is to extract through an algorithmic decomposition system-environment boundaries supporting individuality. We infer or detect…
Current research in biology heavily depends on the availability and efficient use of information. In order to build new knowledge, various sources of biological data must often be combined. Semantic Web technologies, which provide a common…
Life depends as much on the flow of information as on the flow of energy. Here we review the many efforts to make this intuition precise. Starting with the building blocks of information theory, we explore examples where it has been…
This paper explores the idea that information is an essential and distinctive feature of living systems. Unlike non-living systems, living systems actively acquire, process, and use information about their environments to respond to…
Genetic regulatory networks enable cells to respond to the changes in internal and external conditions by dynamically coordinating their gene expression profiles. Our ability to make quantitative measurements in these biochemical circuits…
Computational intelligence is broadly defined as biologically-inspired computing. Usually, inspiration is drawn from neural systems. This article shows how to analyze neural systems using information theory to obtain constraints that help…
Proteins employ the information stored in the genetic code and translated into their sequences to carry out well-defined functions in the cellular environment. The possibility to encode for such functions is controlled by the balance…
Communication of information in complex systems can be considered as major driver of systems evolution. What matters is not the communicated information by itself but rather the meaning that is supplied to the information. However…
Shannon's mathematical theory of communication defines fundamental limits on how much information can be transmitted between the different components of any man-made or biological system. This paper is an informal but rigorous introduction…
Distributed systems, such as biological and artificial neural networks, process information via complex interactions engaging multiple subsystems, resulting in high-order patterns with distinct properties across scales. Investigating how…
The discipline of `theoretical biology' has been developing from its inception several decades ago almost in parallel with the advances in biology, so much so that the latter is often considered to be almost exclusively an empirical…
Information theory, introduced by Shannon, has been extremely successful and influential as a mathematical theory of communication. Shannon's notion of information does not consider the meaning of the messages being communicated but only…
Changes in a cell's external or internal conditions are usually reflected in the concentrations of the relevant transcription factors. These proteins in turn modulate the expression levels of the genes under their control and sometimes need…
The notion of information pervades informal descriptions of biological systems, but formal treatments face the problem of defining a quantitative measure of information rooted in a concept of fitness, which is itself an elusive notion.…
We extend the concept that life is an informational phenomenon, at every level of organisation, from molecules to the global ecological system. According to this thesis: (a) living is information processing, in which memory is maintained by…