Mode of access: World Wide Web.

System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Part of: Synthesis digital library of engineering and computer science.

Series from website.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

An informal overview -- Genetics and communication engineering -- Seeing heredity as a communication process -- Regeneration versus replication -- A brief overview of molecular genetics -- DNA structure and replication -- DNA directs the construction of a phenotype -- From DNA to protein, and from a genome to a phenotype -- Genomes are very long -- An overview of information theory -- Shannon's paradigm -- Quantitative measurement of information -- Coding processes -- A brief introduction to error-correcting codes -- Variant of Shannon's paradigm intended to genetics -- Computing an upper bound of DNA capacity -- Facts of genetics and information theory -- More on molecular genetics -- Molecular memories : DNA and RNA -- Place and function of DNA in the cell -- Genome and phenotype -- DNA recombination and crossing over -- More on information theory -- Alphabet, sources, and entropy -- About source coding -- About channel coding -- Short introduction to algorithmic information theory -- Information and its relationship to semantics -- An outline of error-correcting codes --Communicating a message through a channel -- Repetition as a means of error correction -- Encoding a full message -- Error-correcting codes within information theory -- Convolutional codes -- Turbocodes -- Historical outlook -- Necessity of genomic error correcting codes and its consequences -- DNA is an ephemeral memory -- Probability of symbol erasure or substitution -- Capacity computations -- Estimating the error frequency before correction -- Paradoxically, a permanent memory is ephemeral -- A toy living world -- A simple model -- Computing statistical quantities -- The initial memory content is progressively forgotten -- Introducing natural selection in the toy living world -- Example of a toy living world using a very simple code -- Evolution in the toy living world : phyletic graphs -- Subsidiary hypothesis, nested system -- Description of a nested system -- Rate and length of component codes -- Distances in the nested system -- Consequences of the subsidiary hypothesis -- Soft codes -- Introducing codes defined by a set of constraints -- Genomic error-correcting codes as "soft codes" -- Biological soft codes form nested systems -- Further comments about genomic soft codes -- Is a eukaryotic gene a systematic codeword? -- Biological reality conforms to the hypotheses -- Genomes are very redundant -- Living beings belong to discrete species -- Necessity of successive regenerations -- Saltationism in evolution -- Trend of evolution towards complexity -- Evolution is contingent -- Relationship between genomes and phenotypes -- Identification of genomic codes -- Necessity of identifying genomic codes -- Identifying error-correction means -- Genome distinction and conservation -- Difficulties with sexual reproduction -- Conclusion and perspectives.

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Providing geneticists with an introduction to information theory and error-correcting codes as necessary tools of hereditary communication is the primary goal of this book. Some biological consequences of their use are also discussed, and guesses about hypothesized genomic codes are presented. Another goal is prompting communication engineers to get interested in genetics and biology, thereby broadening their horizon far beyond the technological field, and learning from the most outstanding engineer: Nature.

Also available in print.

Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Nov. 5, 2008).