Information and Life

Battail, Gérard

doi:10.1007/978-94-007-7040-9

Cited by 24 publications

(13 citation statements)

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“…In this sense, ATP is the only universal currency of biological energy. While, information delineates the border between the living and the inanimate, as the living world appears as the only place where information is recorded, processed, or used [21]. Therefore, as an irreplaceable carrier of both energy and information, ATP appears to play a central role in the biochemical system.…”

Section: Inspiration From the Organization Of Extant Biochemical Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

ATP-Hypothesis: A New Conceptual Framework for the Origins of Genetic Codes

Xie¹

2020

Preprint

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The origin of genetic codes is the key to reveal life’s origin on the earth as it is a prerequisite for the existence of life. More than half a century has passed since the discovery of genetic codes, while their origin is still one of the greatest mysteries. Are the origins of genetic codes really unknowable? Do they really require external design? Here, I present an ATP-hypothesis that explains how the genetic codes came into being with the coevolution of biochemical system. ATP has several properties that make it suitable as the initiator of the origin of genetic codes. First, ATP is the only energetic product of photosynthesis. Second, ATP is at the heart of the extant biochemical systems. Third, ATP serves as carriers of both energy and information. Fourth, ATP could energetically elongate chains of both polynucleotides and polypeptides, thus providing a bridge between them, and eventually mediating prebiotic biochemical transaction from energy to information. This hypothesis shows how primitive life emerged through a series of processes from energy to information mediated by ATP. Informatization (processes of creating and managing information) was inevitably coupled with structuralization (processes of organizing or incorporating into a cellular structure), making polynucleotides and polypeptides be cyclized into a system of reciprocal causation. The triplet codon might just be for stereo-chemical handing of amino acid through e.g. Watson–Crick pairing interactions. It is an evolutionary completion for genetic codes from RNA to DNA, only which, a reverse to the Central Dogma, marked the dawn of cellular life when Darwinian evolution began to operate. ATP-hypothesis shades lights on the origin of life, together with the formations of both photosynthesis and biochemical systems, which have been largely unknown so far.

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Section: Inspiration From the Organization Of Extant Biochemical Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

ATP-Hypothesis: A New Conceptual Framework for the Origins of Genetic Codes

Xie¹

2020

Preprint

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“…Both statistical and physical properties of Fisher information are developed. This information is shown to be a physical measure of disorder, 00017-p. 4 ORIGINS sharing with entropy the property of monotonic change with time. The information concept is applied "phenomenally" to derive most known physics, from statistical mechanics and thermodynamics to quantum mechanics, the Einstein field equations, and quantum gravity.…”

Section: Considering the Role Of Information Theory In Physicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Information seems to appear a central notion, next to matter, energy, time and mass. In the last couple of years scientists like Vedral or Battail respectively tried to reinterpret physics or biology putting the notion of information at the core or their approach [3,4].What can be the place of historians in such a contemporary scientific discussion? The lack of hindsight make it from the beginning a very difficult task to undertake.…”

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The notion of information in biology, an appraisal

Segal¹

2015

BIO Web of Conferences

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Abstract. Developed during the first half of the 20th century, in three different fields, theoretical physics, statistics applied to agronomy and telecommunication engineering, the notion of information has become a scientific concept in the context of the Second War World. It is in this highly interdisciplinary environment that "information theory" emerged, combining the mathematical theory of communication and cybernetics. This theory has grown exponentially in many disciplines, including biology. The discovery of the genetic "code" has benefited from the development of a common language based on information theory and has fostered a almost imperialist development of molecular genetics, which culminated in the Human Genome Project. This project however could not fill all the raised expectations and epigenetics have shown the limits of this approach. Still, the theory of information continues to be applied in the current research, whether the application of the self-correcting coding theory to explain the conservation of genomes on a geological scale or aspects the theory of evolution.In a comment published in October 2014 in the well-known journal Nature, specialists of evolutionary theory discussed with "point" and "counterpoint" whether their field needed a complete rethink or not [1]. The advocates of a theoretical change stated: "We hold that organisms are constructed in development, not simply "programmed" to develop by genes. Living things do not evolve to fit into preexisting environments, but co-construct and coevolve with their environments, in the process changing the structure of ecosystems." On the online version of the paper, David Tyler from the Cell Biology Department of the University of Valencia made this insightful remark: "It seems to me that the key issues relate to biological information and the word 'evolution' needs to be defined in a way that does justice to the origin (or loss) of information." In the same vein, a geneticist like Antoine Danchin worked on the links between the reproduction of cells and the replication of genomes, in relation to ageing [2]. He came to the conclusion that "making young structures from aged ones implies creating information" and added "I revisit Information Theory, showing that the laws of physics permit de novo creation of information, provided an energy-dependent process preserving functional entities makes room for entities accumulating information." Information seems to appear a central notion, next to matter, energy, time and mass. In the last couple of years scientists like Vedral or Battail respectively tried to reinterpret physics or biology putting the notion of information at the core or their approach [3,4].What can be the place of historians in such a contemporary scientific discussion? The lack of hindsight make it from the beginning a very difficult task to undertake. Most of those who recognized themselves as historians will officially consider that assessing the value of current scientific research does definitively not belong to their goa...

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“…It has already been asserted that genomes are conserved at the geological time scale thanks to errorcorrecting means, which moreover should take the form of nested component codes which successively appeared during the geological ages [3][4][5][6]. Information is an abstract, non-physical entity, which however is represented by sequences necessarily borne by a physical medium.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Fleeting objects, enduring information

Battail¹

2014

2014 8th International Symposium on Turbo Codes and Iterative Information Processing (ISTC)

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Information can only be defined as an equivalence class of sequences with respect to alphabet changes and encodings, hence it is an abstract entity. However, a sequence is necessarily borne by a physical support. Information thus appears as a bridge between the abstract and the concrete. In the living world, the information borne by genomes acts on matter by instructing the assembly of objects. Physical perturbations degrade the supports, hence the sequences they bear, but the information they represent can be almost indefinitely conserved provided they are endowed with error-correcting codes as powerful as to enable their regeneration, and regenerated frequently enough. Codes made of nested components which successively originated over the ages account for the conservation of the oldest parts of the genomes. The component codes are 'soft', meaning that they result from any kind of non-mathematical constraint, e.g., physical-chemical or linguistic. The genomic information instructs the assembly of living structures by the agency of interwoven semantic feedback loops which lock themselves because the synthetized enzymes catalyse their own assembly.

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Information and Life

Cited by 24 publications

References 0 publications

ATP-Hypothesis: A New Conceptual Framework for the Origins of Genetic Codes

ATP-Hypothesis: A New Conceptual Framework for the Origins of Genetic Codes

The notion of information in biology, an appraisal

Fleeting objects, enduring information

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