Re: [Fis] FIS: DNA and bioinformatics

Dear Sergei and colleagues,

Thanks for your DNA expostulations. Attempting a 'new definition of life' ,
as I interpret from your proposals, may be one of the fundamental
theoretical problems of our time. Actually, in all those new disciplines
stemming out from the bioinformatic revolution (genomics, proteomics,
transcriptomics, metabolomics, signalomics...), there is discussions about
the need of a new integrative or systemic biology, helping to make sense on
the avalanche of info-molecular data. I think that the proper integrative
label should be 'bioinformation', but that's not the big deal... rather it
would be having a clearer idea on how an 'informational explanatory
framework' should differentiate from a reductionist, mechanical one.

Further, I was very interested in Shu-Kun approach to the entropy of mixing
because that is the natural scenario for enzymes' controlling work (as
genuine 'molecular automata'--indeed the automata tables are very easy to
build, see my contribution in our resources section). The handling of
molecular properties (similarity, recognition) behind such entropy, is
consistent with Karl's multidimensional partitions, I think (however, I do
not agree with his subsequent speculations on sequential/ nonsequential
relationships); the next organizational step could be explored by Michael
theory on generative processes... who knows. My conclusive speculation
about the cellular organization is that it implies an universal treatment
of all the intermolecular recognition phenomena, sort of a von Neumann
architecture for handling (and transferring) knowledge about any molecular
recognition case.

Life is tantamount to a new form of information universality. It becomes a
new beast that has quite many unknown parts. Several people here have
grasped some of those parts, but we have to built tentative bridges
interconnecting them to have a glimpse of the whole beast --not easy at all.

Let me conclude with a curious quotation from a molecular chemist that
involves some of Sergei and Shu-Kun views (GR Desiraju, 2003): "A crystal
is a manifestation of mutual recognition, a storage device for structural
information an a victory of enthalpy over entropy".

best

Pedro

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Received on Fri Jun 27 12:18:12 2003