Related papers: Xeno Amino Acids: A look into biochemistry as we d…
This article is interested in the origin of the genetic code, it puts forward a scenario of a simultaneous selection of the bases and amino acids and setting up of a correlation between them. Each amino acid is associated with a pair of its…
Extraterrestrial amino acids, the chemical building blocks of the biopolymers that comprise life as we know it on Earth are present in meteoritic samples. More recently, glycine (NH$_2$CH$_2$COOH), the simplest amino acid, was detected by…
Any search for present or past life beyond Earth should consider the initial processes and related environmental controls that might have led to its start. As on Earth, such an understanding lies well beyond how simple organic molecules…
The rapidly increasing interest in the quantum properties of living matter stimulates a discussion of the fundamental properties of life as well as quantum mechanics. In this discussion often concepts are used that originate in philosophy…
Biological organisms are composed of numerous interconnected biochemical processes. Diseases occur when normal functionality of these processes is disrupted. Thus, understanding these biochemical processes and their interrelationships is a…
There is an intrinsic relationship between the molecular evolution in primordial period and the properties of genomes and proteomes of contemporary species. The genomic data may help us understand the driving force of evolution of life at…
We present a geometrical analysis of the protrusion statistics of side chains in more than 4,000 high-resolution protein structures. We employ a coarse-grained representation of the protein backbone viewed as a linear chain of C{\alpha}…
Many of life's most fascinating phenomena emerge from interactions among many elements--many amino acids determine the structure of a single protein, many genes determine the fate of a cell, many neurons are involved in shaping our thoughts…
The present view of biological phenomena is based on a biochemical paradigm that development of living organisms is defined by information stored in a molecular form as some genetic code. However, new discoveries indicate that biological…
It has been argued that the limited set of proteins used by life as we know it could not have arisen by the process of Darwinian selection from all possible proteins. This probabilistic argument has a number of implicit assumptions that may…
The building blocks of life, amino acids and nucleobases, are believed to have been synthesized in the extreme conditions that prevail in space starting from simple molecules containing hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen. However, the…
The correlations of primary and secondary structures were analyzed using proteins with known structure from Protein Data Bank. The correlation values of amino acid type and the eight secondary structure types at distant position were…
The mathematical concept of q-deformations, in particular the one of qnumbers, is used to study the genetic code(s). After considering two kinds of q-numbers, for comparison, a phenomenological classification scheme of the genetic code…
It has been conjectured that evolution exerted pressure to preserve amino acids bearing thermodynamic, kinetic, and functional roles. In this letter we show that the physical requirement to maintain protein stability gives rise to a…
Many of the building blocks of life such as amino acids and nucleotides are chiral, i.e., different from their mirror image. Contemporary life selects and synthesizes only one of two possible handednesses. In an abiotic environment,…
The origin of life is shrouded in mystery, with few surviving clues, obscured by evolutionary competition. Previous reviews have touched on the complementary approaches of top-down and bottom-up synthetic biology to augment our…
Most amino acids and sugars molecules occur in mirror, or chiral, images of each other, knowns as enantiomers. However, life on Earth is mostly homochiral: proteins contain almost exclusively L-amino acids, while only D-sugars appear in RNA…
In the course of evolution, proteins undergo important changes in their amino acid sequences, while their three-dimensional folded structure and their biological function remain remarkably conserved. Thanks to modern sequencing techniques,…
The search for life elsewhere in the universe is a pivotal question in modern science. However, to address whether life is common in the universe we must first understand the likelihood of abiogenesis by studying the origin of life on…
While modern physics and biology satisfactorily explain the passage from the Big Bang to the formation of Earth and the first cells to present-day life, respectively, the origins of biochemical life still remain an open question. Since…