Dichotomy in the definition of prescriptive information suggests both prescribed data and prescribed algorithms: biosemiotics applications in genomic systems

Bioinformatics has opened up the field of molecular biology through the use of computer science and statistics. Data mining of genetic information includes discovering relationships between individual DNA sequences and variability in disease [1]. More importantly, the application of computer science will contribute to identifying intricate complex data and algorithmic structures that are part of the biological processes that manage and maintain metabolic functions of the cell.Biological organisms are considered to be controlled and regulated by Functional Information (FI) [2-8]. FI comes closer to expressing the intuitive and semantic sense of the word "information" than mere Shannon combinatorial uncertainty or reduced uncertainty (poorly termed "mutual entropy"). The innumerable attempts that have been made to reduce the functional information of genomics and molecular biology to nothing more than physical combinatorics and/or thermodynamics will fail for reasons best summarized in the peer-reviewed anthology entitled The First Gene: The Birth of Programming, Messaging and Formal Control [9]."Functional Information (FI)" has now been formalized into two subsets: Descriptive Information (DI) [7] and Prescriptive Information (PI) [7,10,11]. This formalization of definitions precludes the prevailing confusion of informational terms in the literature. The more specific and accurate term "Prescriptive Information (PI)" has been championed by Abel [12-16] to define the sources and nature of programming controls, regulation and algorithmic processing. Such prescriptions are ubiquitously instantiated into all known living cells [13]. PI either instructs or produces formal function [12] in such a way as to organize and institute a prescribed set of logic-gate programming choices. Without such steering of physicochemical interactions by "Choice-Contingent Causation and Control" (CCCC) [17-19], metabolic pathways and cycles would be impossible to integrate into a cooperative