glaucousNoise
- 30
- 3
Hi all,
I've been thinking about bioinformatic and biophysical problems, and have noticed that notions of symmetry keep cropping up. An obvious example would be protein conformational change, since the correlations between atoms induce reductions in the entropy of the system via degeneracy (although this is too unwieldy to exploit it seems). However I was wondering if this principle applied to even larger scale biological systems. In poking around the interwebs, I found this very dense and curious paper by Sturmfels:
http://arxiv.org/abs/0904.4529
as well as this more theory oriented paper by him and Lior Pachter:
http://www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16132.short
I don't have the background to understand this stuff. I wanted to know if anybody thought there was anything to it, or if it is just another useless method.
I've been thinking about bioinformatic and biophysical problems, and have noticed that notions of symmetry keep cropping up. An obvious example would be protein conformational change, since the correlations between atoms induce reductions in the entropy of the system via degeneracy (although this is too unwieldy to exploit it seems). However I was wondering if this principle applied to even larger scale biological systems. In poking around the interwebs, I found this very dense and curious paper by Sturmfels:
http://arxiv.org/abs/0904.4529
as well as this more theory oriented paper by him and Lior Pachter:
http://www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16132.short
I don't have the background to understand this stuff. I wanted to know if anybody thought there was anything to it, or if it is just another useless method.