Special Issue "Information Processing in Biological Systems"

Dear Colleagues,

Living organisms adapt to environmental changes by performing numerous essential activities, including perceptual sensing, continual learning, decision making and motor control. These functions encompass a wide spectrum of temporal and special scales in the world of animate matter, from unicellular to multicellular beings. The capacity of living organisms to maintain their vital functions requires not only continuous energy transduction and mass conversion, but also the processing of information.

Everyday experiences teach us that information can be created, communicated, gathered, stored, compressed and erased. Everyone performs these operations numerous times a day via the utilization of digital devices powered by electricity. However, only a few ask themselves the following fundamental question: what really is information in the general sense? In this Special Issue, we pose an equally ambitious question: what is information in the biological context and how do biological systems process "it"?

The concept of information was firstly formalized by Claude Shannon in his mathematical theory of communication and then redefined by Andrey Kolmogorov in terms of the algorithmic theory of information. In both theories, however, information is rather an abstract quantity. Meanwhile, from the perspective of biological systems that store and operate information via the utilization of such molecules as DNA, RNA and protein enzymes, this quantity seems to have some physical traits.

This Special Issue provides a platform for researchers who would like to share their knowledge on this topic in the form of original papers or insightful reviews that attend to the following areas of interest:

• information processing between biological cells;
• information processing within cellular immune system;
• information processing within biochemical pathways in cells;
• information processing in gene regulatory networks;
• information processing by biological molecular machines.

Prof. Dr. Przemyslaw Chelminiak
Prof. Dr. Alessandro Giuliani
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• information processing
• biological cells
• immune system
• biochemical networks
• gene regulatory networks
• nanoscopic biomachines