Related papers: From the Wobble to Reliable Hypothesis
A hypothesis of the evolution of the genetic code is proposed, the leading mechanism of which is the nucleotide spontaneous damage leading to AT-enrichment of the genome. The hypothesis accounts for stability of the genetic code towards…
The genetic code is the function from the set of codons to the set of amino acids by which a DNA sequence encodes proteins. Since the codons also influence the shape of the DNA molecule itself, the same sequence that encodes a protein also…
Using the shape space of codons and tRNAs we give a physical description of the genetic code evolution on the basis of the codon capture and ambiguous intermediate scenarios in a consistent manner. In the lowest dimensional version of our…
We review pro and contra of the hypothesis that generic polymer properties of topological constraints are behind many aspects of chromatin folding in eukaryotic cells. For that purpose, we review, first, recent theoretical and computational…
In 2000, Elowitz and Leibler introduced the repressilator--a synthetic gene circuit with three genes that cyclically repress transcription of the next gene--as well as a corresponding mathematical model. Experimental data and model…
It has been proposed that the degeneracy of the genetic code,i.e., the phenomenon that different codons (base triplets) of DNA are transcribed into the same amino acid, may be interpreted as the result of a symmetry breaking process. In the…
The genesis of the stand genetic code is considered as a result of a fusion of two AU- and GC-codes distributed in two dominant and two recessive domains. The fusion of these codes is described with simple empirical rules. This formal…
The genetic code structure into distinct multiplet-classes as well as the numeric degeneracies of the latter are revealed by a two-step process. First, an empirical inventory of the degeneracies (of the shuffled multiplets) in two specific…
In our paper selected linguistic features of genomes to study the statistics of the gene codes are considered. We present the information theory from which it follows that if the system is described by distributions of hyperbolic type it…
The genetic code maps the sixty-four nucleotide triplets (codons) to twenty amino-acids. Some argue that the specific form of the code with its twenty amino-acids might be a 'frozen accident' because of the overwhelming effects of any…
The origin and organizing principles of the genetic code remain fundamental puzzles in life science. The vanishingly low probability of the natural codon-to-amino acid mapping arising by chance has spurred the hypothesis that its structure…
In the framework of the crystal basis model of the genetic code, where each codon is assigned to an irreducible representation of $U_{q \to 0}(sl(2) \oplus sl(2))$, single base mutation matrices are introduced. The strength of the mutation…
It is well-established that many physical properties of DNA at sufficiently long length scales can be understood by means of simple polymer models. One of the most widely used elasticity models for DNA is the twistable worm-like chain…
We challenge the hypothesis that the ground states of a physical system whose degeneracy depends on topology must necessarily realize topological quantum order and display non-local entanglement. To this end, we introduce and study a…
When estimating a phylogeny from a multiple sequence alignment, researchers often assume the absence of recombination. However, if recombination is present, then tree estimation and all downstream analyses will be impacted, because…
We discuss the similarity of the degeneration structure of the genetic code with a pure number theoretic -- ``divisors code.'' The most interesting thing about our observation is not that there is a connection between number theory and the…
The standard genetic code is known to be much more efficient in minimizing adverse effects of misreading errors and one-point mutations in comparison with a random code having the same structure, i.e. the same number of codons coding for…
The standard genetic code is known to be robust to translation errors and point mutations. We studied how small modifications of the standard code affect its robustness. The robustness was assessed in terms of a proper stability function,…
We propose a physical model to describe the mechanisms of two major scenarios of the genetic code evolution, the codon capture and ambiguous intermediate scenarios, in a consistent manner. We sketch the lowest dimensional version of our…
DNA and other biopolymers differ from classical polymers due to their torsional stiffness. This property changes the statistical character of their conformations under tension from a classical random walk to a problem we call the `torsional…