For a number of virus- and bacterium genomes we use the concept of block entropy from information theory and compare it with the corresponding configurational energy, defined via the ionization energies of the nucleotides and a hopping term for their interactions in the sense of a tight-binding model. Additionally to the four-letter alphabet of the nucleotides we discuss a reduction to a two-letter alphabet. We find a well defined relation between block entropy and block energy for a not too large block length which can be interpreted as a generalized dispersion relation for all genome sequences. The relation can be used to look for enhanced interactions between virus and bacterium genomes. Well known examples for virus-virus and virus-bacterium interactions are analyzed along this line. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.