In its beautiful simplicity, the double-helicaln stucture of DNA had entranced us into believing that we can fully understand the information content of a DNA sequence, simply by treating it as text that is read in a linear fashion. While we have learned much based on this assumption, there is much we have missed. Far from a passive tape running through a reader, genomes contain information that appears in new forms which create regions with distinct behavior. The chapters in this volume touch on one or more of three interconnected themes; information can be implied, rather than explicit, in a genome; information can lead to focused and/or regulated changes in nucleotide sequences; information that affects the probability of distinct classes of mutation has implications for evolutionary theory.
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