  These are notes for a set of 7 two-hour lectures given at the 2010 Summer
School on Quantitative Evolutionary and Comparative Genomics at OIST, Okinawa,
Japan. The emphasis is on understanding how biological systems process
information. We take a physicist's approach of looking for simple
phenomenological descriptions that can address the questions of biological
function without necessarily modeling all (mostly unknown) microscopic details;
the example that is developed throughout the notes is transcriptional
regulation in genetic regulatory networks. We present tools from information
theory and statistical physics that can be used to analyze noisy nonlinear
biological networks, and build generative and predictive models of regulatory
processes.
