I would suspect really basic things like replication would be stored somehow in DNA (nuclear DNA, mitochondrial DNA, etc) as they must be highly conserved and mutation resistant in order for organisms to survive and reproduce.
My point was that there is only so much information capacity in the cell if you exclude DNA, surely much less than needed to store electrical fields patterns for a whole embryo.
Like the difference between a silicon microchip and just a silicon block. Same stuff, bit the microchip one has intricate patterns.
https://asunow.asu.edu/20200806-dragon-dna-sequencing-genome...
https://phys.org/news/2020-08-dinosaur-relative-genome-linke...
I really recommend Anton's segment on the Tuatara, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWywZyzmBDE MindBlown!
Those blocks are very small, less than 20 Atoms.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adenine
They’re working on using it for storage. (very slow read write times). Duplicating shouldn’t be a problem.
More realistically, the simplest atom- one proton, one electron- has 3 integer numbers associated with the state of the electron. You need more than a bit to describe the state of that system, so yeah.
I'm not sure what the conclusion of biologists is today, but I have a feeling a lot of important mechanisms aren't encoded in the DNA - or, at least, not anymore. The key insight here is that cell reproduction doesn't happen out of nothing, it's always an existing mechanism working on a new mechanism.
The seminal paper of Ken Thompson, "Reflections on Trusting Trust" (1984)[0], demonstrates how you can encode a backdoor in a compiler in such a way that the compiler embeds this backdoor in every program it builds, and embeds the backdoor-embedding machinery in every new compiler binary it builds. You can use it to build a "vanilla" compiler and make it backdoor-embedding, even though the source code doesn't have backdoor-embedding instructions in it.
I suspect similar things happen in biology - there is computationally relevant information embedded in the runtime state, that's not explicitly encoded in the DNA - but it carries on, because every new living cell is built by a previous living cell.
--
[0] - https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...