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 TITLE:
Information Transfer in Biological Systems
SPEAKER: Wojciech Szpankowski (Purdue University)
DATE: 2:00 - 3:00 PM, Tuesday, July 24, 2007
LOCATION: Tioga, 3U
ABSTRACT:
Information is at the core of virtually every aspect of our lives and
shapes our universe in fundamental ways. The understanding and
harnessing of information are the keys to considerable advances in the
life sciences. As Manfred Eigen, Nobel laureate in biochemistry,
opines: ``The differentiable characteristic of the living systems is
information. Information assures the controlled reproduction of all
constituents, thereby ensuring conservation of viability. Information
theory, pioneered by Claude Shannon, cannot answer this question
... in principle, the answer was formulated 130 years ago by Charles
Darwin.''
To postulate a Darwinian information theory, we first discuss the
limitations of Shannon information theory as it relates to
applications in the life sciences. With these ambitious goals in
mind, we focus in this talk on information transfer through the
concept of a Darwin channel portraying biodiversity, information
discovery from massive (biological) data, and information embodied in
structures such as network motifs. We shall argue that the Darwin
channel should be modeled as the deletion/insertion channel followed
by the constrained channel, whose capacity we estimate. We then adopt
a pattern matching approach to extract biologically pertinent signals
from noise in databases. Finally, we turn our attention to cellular
signaling networks and elicit biologically significant structures by
analyzing large dense subgraphs for such networks.
We hope to convey that quantification, representation, and flow of
information in biosystems is relatively unexplored, although
information might be the essential substrate upon which a
comprehensive theory of biology may be developed.
BIOGRAPHY:
See personal web page of Prof. Szpankowski.
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