On the one hand, biology, chemistry and also physics tell us how the process of translating the genetic information into life could possibly work, but we are still very far from a complete understanding of this process. On the other hand, mathematics and ...

Biological information encoded in genomes is fundamentally different from and effectively orthogonal to Shannon entropy. The biologically relevant concept of information has to do with ‘meaning’, i.e. encoding various biological functions with various ...

I will show how an objective definition of the concept of information and the consideration of recent results about information processing in the human brain help clarify some fundamental aspects of physics and biology. Rather than attempting to define ...

Erwin Schrödinger famously and presciently ascribed the vehicle transmitting the hereditary information underlying life to an ‘aperiodic crystal’. We compare and contrast this, only later discovered to be stored in the linear biomolecule DNA, with the ...

We compare the informational architecture of biological and random networks to identify informational features that may distinguish biological networks from random. The study presented here focuses on the Boolean network model for regulation of the cell ...

Information is a precise concept that can be defined mathematically, but its relationship to what we call ‘knowledge’ is not always made clear. Furthermore, the concepts ‘entropy’ and ‘information’, while deeply related, are distinct and must be used with ...

Today there is a very wide consensus on the idea that embryonic development is the result of a genetic programme and of epigenetic processes. Many models have been proposed in this theoretical framework to account for the various aspects of development, ...

The physico-chemical processes occurring inside cells are under the computational control of genetic (DNA) and epigenetic (internal structural) programming. The origin and evolution of genetic information (nucleic acid sequences) is reasonably well ...

All known life forms are based upon a hierarchy of interwoven feedback loops, operating over a cascade of space, time and energy scales. Among the most basic loops are those connecting DNA and proteins. For example, in genetic networks, DNA genes are ...

In this article, we present a mathematical framework based on redundant (non-power) representations of integer numbers as a paradigm for the interpretation of genomic information. The core of the approach relies on modelling the degeneracy of the genetic ...

The circular code theory proposes that genes are constituted of two trinucleotide codes: the classical genetic code with 61 trinucleotides for coding the 20 amino acids (except the three stop codons {TAA,TAG,TGA}) and a circular code based on 20 ...

We perform a statistical study of the distances between successive occurrences of a given dinucleotide in the DNA sequence for a number of organisms of different complexity. Our analysis highlights peculiar features of the CG dinucleotide distribution in ...

Environmental stress is detrimental to cell viability and requires an adequate reprogramming of cellular activities to maximize cell survival. We present a global analysis of the response of Escherichia coli to acute heat and osmotic stress. We combine ...

Molecular biology is based on two great discoveries: the first is that genes carry hereditary information in the form of linear sequences of nucleotides; the second is that in protein synthesis a sequence of nucleotides is translated into a sequence of ...

The discovery of genetic encoding in the DNA molecule, and its mode of translation into protein structures, secured the modern view of biology as an information science. But it remains unclear what kind of information science it is. The all-too-ready ...

This article reviews contributions to this theme issue covering the topic ‘DNA as information’ in relation to the structure of DNA, the measure of its information content, the role and meaning of information in biology and the origin of genetic coding as ...

Yury Borisovich Rumer was one of the most important theoretical physicists of the former Soviet Union in the early 1930s. However, he also wrote a few ‘biological papers’ on the standard genetic code after he read Crick's and Nirenberg's pioneering papers ...

Biology uses dynamical mechanisms of self-organization and self-assembly of materials, but it also choreographs and directs these processes. The difference between abiotic self-assembly and a biological process is rather like the difference between ...