Category: Uncategorized

INTERNAL MILIEU. “The functionality of expressed RNA and protein sequences is clearly context-dependent—only an exceedingly small subset of these molecules is causally efficacious (i.e. meaningful) in the larger biochemical network of a cell whose functioning is dependent on conditions such as salinity of the cytoplasm, pH, etc. That milieu includes other expressed proteins, RNAs, metabolites and a host of other molecules, the spatial distribution of which is crucial to their individual causal roles.” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn

THE GREY ZONE. “Of the many open questions surrounding how life emerges from non-life, perhaps the most challenging is the vast gulf between complex chemistry and the simplest biology: even the smallest mycoplasma is immeasurably more complex than any chemical reaction network we might engineer in the laboratory with current technology.” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn

EMBEDDED. “Functionality, however, is not a local property of a molecule.” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE for the next two weekends contemplates biological information, how it is organized, and how it may contribute to the transition from inert molecules to that which we call life, what I like to call the Grey Zone. This is at the heart of the issue of the origin of life, and at the heart of how we would even recognize life on another planet. As humans, we have a very, very, modest grip on this topic. View in LinkedIn

FUNCTIONALITY REVEALS DATA. “The genetic material could just as easily be a different variety of nucleic acid (or a different molecule altogether), as recently experimentally confirmed. It is the functionality of the expressed RNAs and proteins—not the bits—that is biologically important.” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn

HARD DRIVE. “Rather, DNA is a (mostly) passive repository for transcription of stored data into RNA, some (but by no means all) of which goes on to be translated into proteins. The biologically relevant information stored in DNA therefore has very little to do with its specific chemical nature (beyond the fact that it is a digital linear polymer).” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn

CONTEXTUALITY NOT BLUEPRINT. “The genome is only a small part of the story. DNA is not a blueprint for an organism: no information is actively processed by DNA alone.” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn

“BIOLOGICAL INFORMATION has an additional quality which may roughly be called ‘functionality’—or ‘contextuality’—that sets it apart from a collection of mere bits.” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn

SLIPPERY DEVIL. “Unfortunately, the way that information operates in biology is not easily characterized.” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn

GREATER THAN THE SUM. “If life is more than just complex chemistry, its unique informational management properties may be the crucial indicator of this distinction.” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn