9 January 2012, 11:00
Ernst-Abbe-Platz 2, seminar room 3423

Principles of Molecular Information Systems

Tsvi Tlutsy (Dept. of Complex Systems, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel)

All organisms rely on noisy molecular recognition to convey, process and store information. This stochastic biophysical setting poses a tough challenge: how to construct information processing systems that are efficient and economical yet error-resilient? I will review recent results that suggest generic design principles of molecular information systems. This biological design problem turns out to be equivalent to the statistical physics of stochastic maps and optimization processes. The examples considered range from molecular codes, through homologous recombination and tRNA decoding by the ribosome, to the spatial organization of chromosomes in the cell nucleus.