ArticleTheoretical biology & medical modelling2005
Uncertainty principle of genetic information in a living cell.
Article in Theoretical biology & medical modelling, 2005. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Using the Constrained Disorder Principle to Navigate Uncertainties in Biology and Medicine: Refining Fuzzy Algorithms.Biology · 2024Review
- Estimating computational limits on theoretical descriptions of biological cells.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- GeneBase 1.1: a tool to summarize data from NCBI gene datasets and its application to an update of human gene statistics.Database : the journal of biological databases and curation · 2016Article
- So what do we really mean when we say that systems biology is holistic?BMC systems biology · 2010Review
- Cancer initiation and progression: an unsimplifiable complexity.Theoretical biology & medical modelling · 2006Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
11 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundFormal description of a cell's genetic information should provide the number of DNA molecules in that cell and their complete nucleotide sequences. We pose the formal problem: can the genome sequence forming the genotype of a given living cell be known with absolute certainty so that the cell's behaviour (phenotype) can be correlated to that genetic information? To answer this question, we propose a series of thought experiments.
resultsWe show that the genome sequence of any actual living cell cannot physically be known with absolute certainty, independently of the method used. There is an associated uncertainty, in terms of base pairs, equal to or greater than micros (where micro is the mutation rate of the cell type and s is the cell's genome size).
conclusionThis finding establishes an "uncertainty principle" in genetics for the first time, and its analogy with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in physics is discussed. The genetic information that makes living cells work is thus better represented by a probabilistic model rather than as a completely defined object.
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Registered trials
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