Main description:

Books on bioinformatics which began appearing in the mid 80s primarily served gene-hunters, and biologists who wished to construct family trees showing tidy lines of descent. Given the great pharmaceutical industry interest in genes, this trend has continued in most subsequent texts. These deal extensively with the exciting topic of gene discovery and searching databases, but hardly consider genomes as information channels through which multiple forms and levels of information, including genic information, have passed through the generations.

Contents:

Prologue.- Part 1: Information and DNA.- Memory - A Phenomenon of Arrangement.- Chargaff's First Parity Rule.- Information Levels and Barriers.- Part 2: Parity and Non-parity.- Chargaff's Second Parity Rule.- Stems and Loops.- Chargaff's Cluster Rule.- Part 3: Variation and Speciation.- Mutation.- Species Survival and Arrival.- The Weak Point.- Chargaff's GC Rule.- Homostability.- Part 4: Conflict within Genomes.- Conflict Resolution.- Exons and Introns.- Complexity.- Part 5: Conflict between Genomes.- Self/Not-self?.- The Crowded Cytosol.- Part 6: Sex and Error-correction.- Rebooting the Genome.- The Fifth Letter.- Part 7.- Information and Mind.- Memory - What to Arrange and Where?.- Appendix 1.- Appendix 2.- Appendix 3.- Index.