Related papers: Observations and perspectives on the prebiotic seq…
Molecular evidence regarding the genetic code has been examined and the findings on the nature of the early events responsible for the amino acid distribution in the code are reported.
Background: There is a 3-fold redundancy in the Genetic Code; most amino acids are encoded by more than one codon. These synonymous codons are not used equally; there is a Codon Usage Bias (CUB). This article will provide novel information…
The idea of the evolution of the genetic code from the CG to the CGUA alphabet has been developed further. The assumption of the originally triplet structure of the genetic code has been substantiated. The hypothesis of the emergence of…
Why is the genetic code the way it is? The most successful theory states that the codon assignments minimise the effects of errors arising in primordial living systems. Here a transversion is reported that leaves invariant degeneracy in the…
A dynamical theory for the evolution of the genetic code is presented, which accounts for its universality and optimality. The central concept is that a variety of collective, but non-Darwinian, mechanisms likely to be present in early…
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…
A plausible architecture of an ancient genetic code is derived from an extended base triplet vector space over the Galois field of the extended base alphabet {D, G, A, U, C}, where the letter D represents one or more hypothetical bases with…
Unraveling the evolutionary forces shaping bacterial diversity can today be tackled using a growing amount of genomic data. While the genome of eukaryotes is highly stable, bacterial genomes from cells of the same species highly vary in…
Important aspects of the process of information storage and retrieval in DNA and RNA, and its evolution, are the role of the anticodons and associated $t$RNA's, and correlations between anticodons and amino acids; the degeneracy of the…
What could cause the emergence of non-encoding codons in the course of evolution of the genetic code? Hypothesis of evolution of the genetic code from GC to the AGUC-alphabet account for existence of stop codons.
We present a statistical model of bacterial evolution based on the coupling between codon usage and tRNA abundance. Such a model interprets this aspect of the evolutionary process as a balance between the codon homogenization effect due to…
The path toward the emergence of life in our biosphere involved several key events allowing for the persistence, reproduction and evolution of molecular systems. All these processes took place in a given environmental context and required…
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…
The genetic code is the set of rules by which information encoded in genetic material (DNA or RNA sequences) is translated into proteins (amino acid sequences) by living cells. The code defines a mapping between tri-nucleotide sequences,…
We address the question, related with the origin of the genetic code, of why are there three bases per codon in the translation to protein process. As a followup to our previous work, we approach this problem by considering the…
An extrapolation of the genetic complexity of organisms to earlier times suggests that life began before the Earth was formed. Life may have started from systems with single heritable elements that are functionally equivalent to a…
As researchers collect increasingly large molecular data sets to reconstruct the Tree of Life, the heterogeneity of signals in the genomes of diverse organisms poses challenges for traditional phylogenetic analysis. A class of phylogenetic…
Information theoretic analysis of genetic languages indicates that the naturally occurring 20 amino acids and the triplet genetic code arose by duplication of 10 amino acids of class-II and a doublet genetic code having codons NNY and…
Degeneracy is a salient feature of genetic codes, because there are more codons than amino acids. The conventional table for genetic codes suffers from an inability of illustrating a symmetrical nature among genetic base codes. In fact,…
The genetic code underlying protein synthesis is a canonical example of a degenerate biological system. Degeneracies in physical and biological systems can be lifted by external perturbations thus allowing degenerate systems to exhibit a…