Towards a Biological Coding Theory Discipline

General abstract: How can information required for the proper functioning of a cell, an organism, or a species be transmitted in an error-introducing environment? Clearly, similar to engineering communication systems, biological systems must incorporate error control in their information transmission processes. If genetic information in the DNA sequence is encoded in a manner similar to error control encoding, the received sequence, the messenger RNA (mRNA) can be analysed using coding theory principles. This work explores potential parallels between engineering communication systems and the central dogma of genetics and presents a coding theory approach to modelling the process of protein translation initiation. The messenger RNA is viewed as a noisy encoded sequence and the ribosome as an error control decoder. Decoding models based on chemical and biological characteristics of the ribosome and the ribosome binding site of the mRNA are developed and results of applying the models to the Escherichia coli K-12 are presented.