Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Gasser, Les
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Gasser, Les
Committee Member(s)
Renear, Allen H.
Luthey-Schulten, Zaida A.
Efron, Miles J.
Department of Study
Library & Information Science
Discipline
Library & Information Science
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Information science
Philosophy of information
Evolution
Genetic code
Codon bias
Biological information
Abstract
The informational properties of biological systems are the subject of much
debate and research. I present a general argument in favor of the existence
and central importance of information in organisms, followed by a case study
of the genetic code (specifically, codon bias) and the translation system from
the perspective of information. The codon biases of 831 Bacteria and Archeae
are analyzed and modeled as points in a 64-dimensional statistical space. The
major results are that (1) codon bias evolution does not follow canonical
patterns, and (2) the use of coding space in organsims is a subset of the
total possible coding space. These findings imply that codon bias is a unique
adaptive mechanism that owes its existence to organisms' use of information in
representing genes, and that there is a particularly biological
character to the resulting biased coding and information use.
Graduation Semester
2011-08
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/26089
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Copyright 2011 by Daniel T. Wright. All rights reserved.
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