title: Unlimited capacity and processibility of sequence information: prerequisites for a system of biological chains.
abstract: Both genetic chains in a cell and phonological chains in a human phonological working memory simultaneously store and process sequence information. Unlimited capacity and processibility of sequence information are two prerequisites for such a system of biological chains. It is demonstrated that information chains (I-chains) and conformation chains (C-chains) satisfy these two prerequisites. Namely, in both kinds of chains constant efficiency and precision of intra- and inter-sequence interactions are guaranteed irrespective of the chain length. Nucleic acids and proteins are I-chains and C-chains of genetic chains, respectively. A 'molecular' model of a phonological chain is formulated based on the properties of phonological working memory. It is proposed that prose and verse are I-chains and C-chains of phonological chains, respectively. The correspondence between a system of genetic chains and a system of phonological chains is explored in detail. A critical difference between systems of biological chains and artificial information-processing systems is attributed to the existence of C-chains.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Advanced Energy, Kyoto University, Gokasho, Uji, Kyoto 611-0011, Japan.
authors.forename: Koji
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Maekawa
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D007257:Information Theory; D008568:Memory; D008954:Models, Biological; D008957:Models, Genetic; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D010700:Phonetics