Molecular Information Theory

Basic Sciences

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

In this past year we reported the discovery of T7 Islands by usingmolecular information theory. These genetic elements appear, so far,only in pathogenic bacterial strains and so may have some effect indiseases. The T7 islands contain promoters for T7-like bacteriophagebut they do not contain T7-like polymerases. Each island has severalunique genes with unknown function, an integrase and direct repeats onthe ends. A second report shows how the fundamental theorem ofinformation theory, the channel capacity theorem, is actually a theorem about biology. This fuses information technologies withmolecular biology. A third paper reports the development of agraphical technique for displaying correlations between parts of aDNA, RNA or protein, the three-dimensional sequence logo. We havedeveloped a nanotechnology for detection of molecules, Rod-TetherNanoprobes (patent pending).