85

7

How to Better Understand Signal Cascades

and Measure the Encoded Information

Abstract

Shannon has made it possible to measure how much information is contained in a mes­

sage. It is calculated how many bits of information are contained in each part (word,

nucleotide, etc.) of a message. Interestingly, this can identify any number of codes,

languages, and encodings in the cell. Since living cells are not computers, but numerous

biochemical reactions run simultaneously side by side and sometimes quite disorderly,

causing a lot of commotion and disturbance, it is important to send this information as

clearly as possible, for example to amplify signals by signal cascades. The more pre­

cisely the signal is understood and implemented in the cell, the better the cell survives.

Therefore, survival pressure already ensured that the genetic information is well coded

and well transferred into various other codes. These codes can again be “cracked” by

bioinformatics for good predictions, for example for sequence analysis.

7.1

Coding with Bits

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7.1

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© Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2023

T. Dandekar, M. Kunz, Bioinformatics,

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-65036-3_7