Datasets for manuscript: The nature, representation and measure of genetic information

Current studies in genetics very often refer to notions from information
science. The concept of genetic information is still disputed because it
attributes semantic traits to what seem to be regular biochemical
entities. Some researchers maintain that the use of information in biology
is just metaphorical and maybe even misleading. In this paper, we offer an
analysis of the nature and characteristics of the use of information in
proteins, protein families, and their sequences. It is argued that the
foundation of the metaphorical view is relatively weak given the current
findings in bioinformatics, and it is shown that the present understanding
of genetics fits well into the context of the modern philosophy of
information. Here, we propose an extension of Floridi’s conceptual model
of information to include genetic information better. In addition, we
discuss how to understand the qualitative aspects of genetic information
and how to measure its quantitative aspects and present a joint
statistical model including qualitative genetics, where the nominal
genetic function is represented jointly with its metric self-information.
The functional information of protein families in the Cath and Pfam
databases are analysed. The paper concludes that scientific work may place
information firmly as one of the fundamental components of molecular
biology. The protein alignment files from the
Cath and Pfam databases are in FASTA format.