I went to a talk yesterday by Chris Wiggins on gene networks, signal processing, and information. I found it a bit unfortunate that he used the phrase “the mutual information between chemistry and genetics” and wrote up I(c,g) on the board. I eventually figured out what he meant, but it immediately brought to mind the famous “Information Theory, Photosynthesis, and Religion” editorial by Elias in the IT Transactions.
Although I had to duck out of the talk early, at the beginning we got to see the Inner Life Of A Cell video, which is amazing. There are versions with narration from the Harvard multimedia website. I know this has been around a while, but I hadn’t seen it yet. It’s definitely worth a look.
asarwate:
thanks for pointing out this paper, which i had never heard of.
the technical details of I(c,g) as I meant it are in a preprint we submitted to the arxiv last year: “Optimal signal processing in small stochastic biochemical networks” ( http://arxiv.org/abs/q-bio.MN/0612041 ).
best regards,
-c.w.