Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-11T01:42:19.709Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Preventing a paradigm shift: A plea for the computational genome

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2012

Carmine Garzillo  and
Giuseppe Trautteur
Carmine Garzillo
Affiliation:
Dipartimento di Scienze mediche preventive, Università di Napoli Federico II, 80138 Naples, Italy. carmine.garzillo@unina.it
Giuseppe Trautteur
Affiliation:
Dipartimento di Scienze fisiche, Università di Napoli Federico II, 80138 Naples, Italy. trau@na.infn.it
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Against the opinion that DNA as program is not sufficiently explanatory, we maintain that the cellular machinery is entirely computational, and we identify the crucial notion of the interpreter that expresses the gene with the minimal gene set. Epigenetics research does not so much need paradigm shifts as the unraveling of an exceedingly complex computational machine.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 35 , Issue 5 , October 2012 , pp. 365 - 366
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Davis, M. (2004) The Undecidable. Dover.Google Scholar
Ferguson-Smith, A. C. Greally, J. M. & Martienssen, R. A. (Eds.) (2009) Epigenomics. Springer.Google Scholar
Garzillo, C. & Trautteur, G. (2009) Computational virtuality in biological systems. Theoretical Computer Science 410:323–31.Google Scholar
Gil, R. Silva, F. J., Peret, J. & Moya, A. (2004) Determination of the core of a minimal bacterial gene set. Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews 68:518–37.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Glass, J. I., Assad-Garcia, N., Alperovich, N., Yooseph, S., Lewis, M. R., Maruf, M., Hutchison III, C. A., Smith, H. O. & Venter, J. C. (2006) Essential genes of a minimal bacterium. PNAS 103:425–30.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Herken, R. (Ed.) (1988) The universal Turing machine. A half-century survey. Verlag Kammerer & Unverzagt.Google Scholar
Koonin, E. V. (2000) How many genes can make a cell: The minimal-gene-set concept. Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics 1:99–116.Google Scholar
Myhill, J. (1970) The abstract theory of self-reproduction. In: Essays on cellular automata, ed. Burks, A. W., pp. 206–18. University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Rogers, H. Jr. (1967) Theory of partial recursive functions and effective computability. McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Stent, G. (1975) Explicit and implicit semantic content of the genetic information, in the centrality of science and absolute values. In: Fourth International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences, Vol. 1, pp. 261–77. International Cultural Foundation.Google Scholar
Turing, A. M. (1936–37) On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem. Proceedings of London Mathematical Society 42:230–65 and 544–46.Google Scholar
von Neumann, J. (1966) Theory of self-reproducing automata. (Edited and completed by Burks, A. W..) University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar