Enzymes, artificial cells and the nature of biological information

Recent progresses in enzyme processing within an expanding array of disciplines make the informational analysis of the whole enzymic complexity of the simplest cellular systems appear as a plausible interdisciplinary enterprise. The term ‘artificial cell’ could be used as a label to encompass these global information processing models of the cell. In a simplified view, three different degrees of enzymic complexity emerge: self-organization, self-reshaping and self-modification. They imply that metabolic enzyme networks endowed with a signaling system and with a ‘DNA world’, constitute a genuine information processing engine for cellular problem solving, a true molecular ‘society’. Philosophically, a new path can be followed to discuss the biological foundations and the paradoxes of the information concept. Other ‘informational societies’ could be analyzed in a similar way.