ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns the handling of cellular information. DNA is the master informational molecule of the cell. The DNA of each species is specific for that species and directs its faithful reproduction. The chapter considers the biosynthesis of the nucleic acids and the proteins. In doing so, it comes face to face with a new aspect or quality of molecular components of the cell, namely the information. The theoretical relationships between information and entropy tell us that assembling the cell structures from a collection of molecules is a process that must proceed with a very large decrease in internal entropy. The analogy with Boltzmann’s formula relative to the entropy in the microcanonical ensemble. The amount of information in a message is expressed in terms of the probability of a sequence of binary choices or bits. It is interesting to notice that an interpretation of entropy is that of missing information.
