🚀 go-pugleaf

swarat_c@lycos.com (Swarat Chaudhuri) wrote in message news:<51c62199.0112171741.565cea72@posting.google.com>...
> May some kindred spirit shed some light on the following!
> 
> Has there been any effort to mathematically describe the minimum  
> information content of a DNA string? For instance, in the lines of 
> Kolmogorov complexity? Note that DNA strings are not completely
> random:
> there is a certain amount of structure. Chaitin's 1977 article on 
> algorithmic information theory points to some possible (IMHO, 
> rather ambitious) directions in which information theory may be
> applied to
> biological systems. He talks about giving a quantitative
> characterization
> of the structural information contained in a living organism. 
> 
> My question is: has there any further (concrete) work in this
> direction? If yes, can anyone supply some pointers? I checked out the
> webpage of a lab at NCI which works on applying notions of entropy to
> biosystems, but this doesn't seem to be remotely close to what
> Chaitin discusses.
> 
> Disclaimer: I am more or less illiterate so far as biology literature 
> goes, so don't flame me if this turns out to be a perfectly standard
> and
> well-studied issue in theoretical biology.  
> 
> Cheers,
> Swarat



Well, I don't think you would call it "perfectly standard", but there
are a number of people working in this area.

Try Tom Schneider's page for starters (and lots of links):
http://www.lecb.ncicrf.gov/~toms/

Cheers,

Matt