ArticlePhilosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences2016
The meaning of biological information.
Article in Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed.
- Life as a Categorical Information-Handling System: An Evolutionary Information-Theoretic Model of the Holobiont.Biology · 2026Review
- Information and fitness in two-state systems: self-replicating individuals in a fluctuating environment.ArXiv · 2025Article
- Article
- Organismal complexity strongly correlates with the number of protein families and domains.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- LncRNA Functional Screening in Organismal Development.Non-coding RNA · 2023Review
- Constructive connectomics: How neuronal axons get from here to there using gene-expression maps derived from their family trees.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Robots as models of evolving systems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Thermodynamics of evolution and the origin of life.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Information Entropy in Chemistry: An Overview.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- Uncovering patterns of the evolution of genomic sequence entropy and complexity.Molecular genetics and genomics : MGG · 2021Article
- The thermodynamics of cognition: A mathematical treatment.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2021Article
- Multiscale structural complexity of natural patterns.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Driven progressive evolution of genome sequence complexity in Cyanobacteria.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Evolution of communication signals and information during species radiation.Nature communications · 2020Article
- Entropy and Information within Intrinsically Disordered Protein Regions.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2019Article
- A Suggestion of Converting Protein Intrinsic Disorder to Structural Entropy Using Shannon's Information Theory.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2019Article
- CRISPR: a new principle of genome engineering linked to conceptual shifts in evolutionary biology.Biology & philosophy · 2019Article
- Physical foundations of biological complexity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- Informational limits of biological organisms.The EMBO journal · 2018Article
- The Dynamical Emergence of Biology From Physics: Branching Causation via Biomolecules.Frontiers in physiology · 2018Article
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Abstract
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 degree of evolutionary conservation. Apart from direct experimentation, the meaning, or biological information content, can be extracted and quantified from alignments of homologous nucleotide or amino acid sequences but generally not from a single sequence, using appropriately modified information theoretical formulae. For short, information encoded in genomes is defined vertically but not horizontally. Informally but substantially, biological information density seems to be equivalent to 'meaning' of genomic sequences that spans the entire range from sharply defined, universal meaning to effective meaninglessness. Large fractions of genomes, up to 90% in some plants, belong within the domain of fuzzy meaning. The sequences with fuzzy meaning can be recruited for various functions, with the meaning subsequently fixed, and also could perform generic functional roles that do not require sequence conservation. Biological meaning is continuously transferred between the genomes of selfish elements and hosts in the process of their coevolution. Thus, in order to adequately describe genome function and evolution, the concepts of information theory have to be adapted to incorporate the notion of meaning that is central to biology.
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