Biological information and the genetic code
Välkommen till föreläsningen i seminarieserien i matematik.
According to the modern scientific developments, the information is getting to be a fundamental notion like space, time and matter. These four fundamental concepts are substantially interconected and represent the basic form of existence of the universe. Being fundamental, there is no complete definition of the information. According to our intuition, we differ what is the information from what it is not. In the present talk, I consider information as a very special state of the material system with a meaning. Such very special state of the system determines evolution of another system. Depending on complexity of the system one can speak about physical, chemical, biological and other information.
Biological information (bioinformation) is related to a special state of a biological system – from viruses to multicellular organisms. The main example of the bioinformation system is DNA, which is a special long sequence of pairs of nucleotides. A part of DNA codes proteins, while the other one is partly related to the regulation functions. The part that codes codons contains genes whose codons code amino acids, which are building blocks of proteins. The special connection between 64 codons and 20 amino acids with the stop signal is known as the genetic code.
In this talk, I plan to speak about basic properies of biological information and about the genetic code as an illustrative example of bioinformation with its functioning. I will also point out the role of p-adic ultrametrics in description of the genetic code.
References
- Dragovich, N. Z. Misic, p-Adic Hierarchical Properties of the Genetic Code, BioSystems 185 (2019) 104017.
- Dragovich, A. Dragovich, p-Adic Modeling of the Genome and the Genetic Code, Computer Journal 53(4) (2010) 432-442.
- Dragovich, A. Yu. Khrennikov, N. Z. Misic, Ultrametrics in the Genetic Code and the Genome, Applied Mathematics and Computation 309 (2017) 350--358.