Related papers: Biological Information
Composition is a powerful principle for systems biology, focused on the interfaces, interconnections, and orchestration of distributed processes to enable integrative multiscale simulations. Whereas traditional models focus on the structure…
How much information is transmitted when animals use emotions to communicate? It is clear that emotions are used as communication systems in humans and other species. The quantitative theory of emotion information presented here is based on…
In this Chapter, we ask questions (1) What is the right way to measure the quality of information processing in a biological system? and (2) What can real-life organisms do in order to improve their performance in information-processing…
I propose here a new concept of information based on two relevant aspects of its expression. The first related to the undeniable fact that the expression of information modifies the physical state of its receiver. The second to the…
Relation of genome sizes to organisms complexity is still described rather equivocally. Neither the number of genes (G-value), nor the total amount of DNA (C-value) correlates consistently with phenotype complexity. Using information theory…
A key challenge in modern computing is to develop systems that address complex, dynamic problems in a scalable and efficient way, because the increasing complexity of software makes designing and maintaining efficient and flexible systems…
Information transmission in biological signaling circuits has often been described using the metaphor of a noise filter. Cellular systems need accurate, real-time data about their environmental conditions, but the biochemical reaction…
We deploy Shannon's information entropy to the distribution of branching fractions in a particle decay. This serves to quantify how important a given new reported decay channel is, from the point of view of the information that it adds to…
It is high time to openly and without finalism define the dangerous but needed term 'purposeful information', whose quantity is an Eigen information value. Using the term 'biological information' in its stead forces one into an…
One of the main properties of biological systems is modularity, which manifests itself at all levels of their organization, starting with the level of molecular genetics, ending with the level of whole organisms and their communities. In a…
Shannon information theory provides various measures of so-called "syntactic information", which reflect the amount of statistical correlation between systems. In contrast, the concept of "semantic information" refers to those correlations…
The body morphology plays an important role in the way information is perceived and processed by an agent. We address an information theory (IT) account on how the precision of sensors, the accuracy of motors, their placement, the body…
Throughout the evolution of biological species on Earth, cells and organs have developed many complex structures and processes to ensure their interactions with individual chemical molecules (small and macromolecular) and nanoscale objects…
One of the fundamental steps toward understanding a complex system is identifying variation at the scale of the system's components that is most relevant to behavior on a macroscopic scale. Mutual information provides a natural means of…
Biological phenomena differ significantly from physical phenomena. At the heart of this distinction is the fact that biological entities have computational abilities and thus they are inherently difficult to predict. This is the reason why…
Living organisms are the most complex, interesting and significant objects regarding all substructures of the universe. Life science is regarded as a science of the 21st century and one can expect great new discoveries in the near futures.…
Assessing where and how information is stored in biological networks (such as neuronal and genetic networks) is a central task both in neuroscience and in molecular genetics, but most available tools focus on the network's structure as…
Information decompositions quantify how the Shannon information about a given random variable is distributed among several other random variables. Various requirements have been proposed that such a decomposition should satisfy, leading to…
The applicability of computational models to the biological world is an active topic of debate. We argue that a useful path forward results from abandoning hard boundaries between categories and adopting an observer-dependent, pragmatic…
These are notes for a set of 7 two-hour lectures given at the 2010 Summer School on Quantitative Evolutionary and Comparative Genomics at OIST, Okinawa, Japan. The emphasis is on understanding how biological systems process information. We…