On grammars, complexity, and information measures of biological macromolecules
1980
Ebeling, W. | Jimenez-Montano, M.A.
Based on Chomsky's hierarchy of phase structure grammars and on the complexity concept of Kolmogorov and Chaitin, an approach to the syntactic analysis of biopolymers is developed. Context-free and context-sensitive grammars are applied to the description of polypeptides and polynucleotides. The length of the minimal grammar program generating the sequence is used as a measure of its complexity, and the number of rules (derivational length) as a measure of the grammar structure. 25 DNA, RNA, and protein sequences are analysed. It is shown that the derivational length has a tendency to increase along phylogenetic pathways. A proposal is made to connect the replication rates in the Eigen-Schuster theory with the concepts developed here.
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