Life is an Information Processing System

Before you read this article, I would like to tell you that the ideas and theories expressed here are my own views and still need to be scientifically established. So do not consider it as proof of anything. You are free to extrapolate them, comment on them or critique them. Hope, you will find it interesting.

When you see life (by life here I mean living organisms and not the philosophical meaning of it) in terms of collective steps of information processing then information in biological entities can be classified into three types:

1) Genetic information

2) Structural information

3) Non-genetic information (in case of higher organisms, particularly humans)

Genetic Information:

It is the latent information stored in genetic material that gives rise to the basic structure of an organism. It is stored in a coded form (hence condensed) and when decoded gives rise to the structural information. It is complete (in itself it is sufficient to give rise to whole biological organism) and is passed over from generation to generation.

Structural Information:

By structural information I mean the structure of the proteins they fold into and hence giving rise to their functionality. It is the most crucial information for any living organism because it makes them tick. No doubt, protein folding is holy grail for biology at this moment. Even though there is so much diversity in case of protein structure, the domains are very much conserved and the reactions are very specific. Structural information is derived from the genetic information and hence passes from generation to generation as genetic information which each organism has to decode into the structural information. And structural information is also responsible for expression of genetic information, its replication and storage.

Non-genetic Information:

I define non-genetic information as the information gathered from the environment. It is the information that an organism "remembers" or "reacts to". E.g. human learning, response to external stimuli, flight or fight response in animals, antigen information stored in immune system (memory B-cells) etc. It may be passed from generation to generation but not in genetic form. e.g. you teaching your child how to ride a bicycle, antibodies passed on from mother to child during birth etc.

If you consider various biological processes as systems, then, based on the above classification, they can be classified into systems processing one or more of the above information. This classification gives a whole new "view" of life and its processes. Also, there is a theory proposed for evolution which considers the interacting molecules as the basic entity of evolution instead of just molecules. This theory further highlights that reactions are a way of passing information (or signals) from one molecule to another and that information is in the structural form in molecules. This gives us a very interesting picture of how biochemical reactions and processes can be analysed as information processing and "passing". Consider a protein A with a unique structure (hence unique structure information) binds in a specific way to protein B which is a chemical reaction in biological terms but can be seen as information passing (from one structure to another). The information changes in terms of the content because the structure of protein B is different from protein A yet the ultimate sanctity of the information passing is conserved since we know that protein B with its unique structure will pass it only to protein C which is the intended receiver (notice again the information content changes since protein C structure i.e. structure information is different). Now, extrapolating the observation we just made, we can see that the structure of protein domains (since it is the domains that interact with each other) are very limited and conserved. Now, if we know the exact protein domain-domain interaction in a biological process, and we know the rate of the reaction (it would be the frequency of the information passing), we can construct a computer model that can not only represent the whole biological process but also replicate the same in silico.

If further analysed then we can see life processes as different information computing processes and hence theoretically can compute it and decide an outcome of the process. I would really like to try this out practically. And I believe Computational systems biology is the answer for that. Well, I know we need to fine tune this but it is a good start; at least for me! Let's see where it goes from here.