[Fis] Essential Core?

[Pedro C. Marijuan]

Dear FISers,

[NOTE: I have just seen the new post from Marcus right now: I should 
modify parts of the discussion below, but it is too much work! Better 
left for a future exchange...]

About the a priori modeling of information --and meaning-- which was the 
focus of Marcus' presentation, putting together Shannon, Bateson, and 
Darwin, I am not sure how that scheme would translate into the "real" 
living stuff. Mostly thinking on the work my team has done on bacterial 
communication for years, I mentioned days ago three basic points about 
that: universals, species-specificity, and essential cores.

How a plurality of those information universals could be wrapped or 
articulated around an essential core? That's the toughest point in my 
opinion. It becomes a matter for freewheeling speculation, badly needed 
of Schrodinger's disclaimer. Well, let us consider that communication 
and self-production are but the two inseparable sides of the bio "coin" 
--in order to self-produce the living has to communicate with the 
environment, and in order to communicate the living needs its flexible 
self-production processes... (just to fabricate the meaning!)

In bacteria, the side of communication might be seen as implying:

--*Communication for self-production*: detection and 
introjection/ejection of environmental substances (water, anions, 
cations, minerals, nutrients, metabolites, waste, and toxics). In 
bacteria this is crucial. Most of it, apart from the spontaneous 
membrane permeability, is done by around one hundred different 
ONE-COMPONENT SYSTEMS (1CS) and a variety of channels and transporters.

--*Communication **with****con-specifics*: in reproduction (sex 
exchanges, plasmid exchanges); in social structures (colonies and 
biofilms); in "differentiation" (sporulation, occasional differentiated 
types). Around 10-20 TWO-COMPONENT SYSTEMS (2CS) may be in charge, 
although amply swapping their functions with the previous 1CSs.

--*Ecosystem communication*: cooperation and competition with other 
species in ecosystems; chemical arm races with fungi, viruses, other 
bacteria, protists, etc.; symbiosis, cooperation and parasitism with 
multicellular hosts; pathogenic switching... We may find tools such as 
1CS, 2CS, 3CS, special protein kinases, and very complex apparatuses for 
pathogenesis, predation, and chemical arm races.

Not much emphasis needed in that those three items are universals, 
species specific, and more or less differentiated/entangled within the 
mentioned communication side of the bio core.

Thereafter, thinking about the universals side of self-production, could 
we terribly simplify our informational view of self-production, as 
Francis Crick's mandated with his Central Dogma of molecular biology? 
Nonetheless it was the first cogent explanation of the flow of genetic 
information within a biological system. In any case, what we find is 
different informational architectures --membranes and cytoskeleton 
rudiments, nucleic acids, processing enzymes-- which are respectively 
based on identity, complementarity, and supplementarity principles 
(Shu-Kun Lin). They are playing together the *replication, 
**transcription,* *translation, **house-keeping*, and *degradation* 
functions that apparently integrate the bulk of self-production...

Summing up the obtained items, and just to close the present 
speculation, we might have found three universals of communication and 
another five of self-production. Indeed they look very densely entangled 
within an essential core. At stake is whether they are sufficiently 
congruent and ontologically robust. Perhaps the most interesting aspect 
is that herein it becomes relatively easy to upend meaning, value, 
knowledge-recombination and other members of the conceptual cluster that 
usually accompanies information.

Thanking in advance for the patience!

--Pedro

-- 
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Pedro C. Marijuán
Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud
Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA)
Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta X
50009 Zaragoza, Spain
Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 (& 6818)
pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
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