The emergence of synthetic bacteria as well as recent advances in the areas of systems biology and micro- & nano-electromechanical systems have enabled scientists to design custom biochemical circuits at nano and micro scales. For communication theory researchers this success has opened the doors for a new and exciting field of interdisciplinary research which requires knowledge from areas such as chemistry and biology which previously have not been considered in communications research. This tutorial is devoted to systems that transfer information in the biological domain and therefore, are based on physical principles that are not commonplace in conventional communication systems.
I will first provide motivation by introducing some of the potential applications of biological communication systems (e.g.; biological Forward-Error-Correcting codes, smart drug design, early stage cancer detection etc). This will be followed by the basic principles involved in modeling a biological communication channel. Taking a protein array (biosensor) as an example I will then explain how to model it is a communication channel and evaluate its information theoretic capacity.