Wednesday, August 31, 2011

This guy thinks like me!

Abstract
The idea that we could build molecular communications systems can be advanced by investigating how actual molecules from living organisms function. Information theory provides tools for such an investigation. This review describes how we can compute the average information in the DNA binding sites of any genetic control protein and how this can be extended to analyze its individual sites. A formula equivalent to Claude Shannon’s channel capacity can be applied to molecular systems and used to compute the efficiency of protein binding. This efficiency is often 70% and a brief explanation for that is given. The results imply that biological systems have evolved to function at channel capacity, which means that we should be able to build molecular communications that are just as robust as our macroscopic ones.Thomas Schneider

Is Shannon the Theory of Everything? From astro physics to economics to nanotech to atomic physics to biology, we see this everywhere now.

I should read the article, but if I were looking at the problem, I would compute the variatians in the DNA binding sites, then estimate the channel bandwidth needed to cover the variations. That gives you the channel efficiency. We are asking: If the DAN binding sites result from a Huffamn encoder than what was the channel bandwidth.

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