In this past year we reported the discovery of T7 Islands by using molecular information theory. These genetic elements appear, so far, only in pathogenic bacterial strains and so may have some effect in diseases. The T7 islands contain promoters for T7-like bacteriophage but they do not contain T7-like polymerases. Each island has several unique genes with unknown function, an integrase and direct repeats on the ends. A second report shows how the fundamental theorem of information theory, the channel capacity theorem, is actually a theorem about biology. This fuses information technologies with molecular biology. A third paper reports the development of a graphical technique for displaying correlations between parts of a DNA, RNA or protein, the three-dimensional sequence logo. Our recent papers characterize E. coli sigma 70 promoters, Fur binding site clusters and how binding rate constants are related to information in binding sites. We have developed a nanotechnology for detection of molecules, Rod-Tether Nanoprobes (patent pending). A related nanotechnology is a single-molecule DNA sequencing machine, the Medusa(TM) Sequencer (patent pending).
Z01 BC 08396-14
Showing the most recent 10 out of 20 publications
