Peculiarities of Glucose Molecules Destruction under Irradiation at the M-30 Microtron (12.5 MeV): Mass Spectrometric Studies

The method of mass spectrometric studies was used to study the fragmentation of glucose in the gas phase upon collision with low-energy electrons (20-70 eV) before and after irradiation at the M-30 microtron (12.5 MeV) with doses of 14 and 164 kGy. The dose dependence of the transformation of glucose mass spectra was established. The results indicate the dominance in mass spectra of symmetric fission channels of the molecule itself and its fragments formed under the action of M-30 microtron radiation. The same ways of fragmentation of glucose one can expect under chemical, thermal, and biological processes at the cellular level. The dominant channels of fragmentizing the glucose molecule without and considering its radiation treatment are explained within the framework of the method of structural combinations. The obtained results are essential for understanding the processes of cellular biochemistry and biophysics involving glucose, the hierarchy of its fragmentation channels under the influence of terrestrial radiation factors, and metabolic processes.

An information geometrical evaluation of Shannon information metrics on a discrete n-dimensional digital manifold

The definition and nature of information have perplexed scientists due to its dual nature in measurements. The information is discrete and continuous when evaluated on a metric scale, and the Laplace-Beltrami operator and Gauss-Bonnet Theorem can map one to another. On the other hand, defining the information as a discrete entity on the surface area of an n-dimensional discrete digital manifold provides a unique way of calculating the entropy of a manifold. The software simulation shows that the surface area of the discrete n-dimensional digital manifold is an effectively computable function. Moreover, it also provides the information-geometrical evaluation of Shannon information metrics.

Information processing and energy efficiency of temperature-sensitive Morris-Lecar neuron

In biological organisms, the temperature is an important factor, which affects the motion of micro-particles and biochemical reaction. In current work, we investigate the effect of temperature on the capacity of information processing and the energy efficiency of the Hodgkin's three basic classes of neurons. Increasing the temperature, both of the total entropy and information rate would maintain nearly as constant, and then decrease rapidly and fall to zero. Moreover, energy consumption is reduced as the temperature increases. However, the energy consumption of the class 1 neuron is remarkably greater than that of class 2 and 3 neurons with the same temperature. It is also interesting that the class 3 neuron consumes less energy than that of class 1 and 2 neurons, but generates the same value of total entropy and information rate for the same condition.

The information capacity of the genetic code: Is the natural code optimal?

We envision the molecular evolution process as an information transfer process and provide a quantitative measure for information preservation in terms of the channel capacity according to the channel coding theorem of Shannon. We calculate Information capacities of DNA on the nucleotide (for non-coding DNA) and the amino acid (for coding DNA) level using various substitution models. We extend our results on coding DNA to a discussion about the optimality of the natural codon-amino acid code. We provide the results of an adaptive search algorithm in the code domain and demonstrate the existence of a large number of genetic codes with higher information capacity. Our results support the hypothesis of an ancient extension from a 2-nucleotide codon to the current 3-nucleotide codon code to encode the various amino acids.