Circular Tessera Codes in the Evolution of the Genetic Code
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Circular Tessera Codes in the Evolution of the Genetic Code Elena Fimmel1 · Martin Starman1 · Lutz Strüngmann1 Received: 12 February 2020 / Accepted: 19 March 2020 / Published online: 4 April 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The origin of the modern genetic code and the mechanisms that have contributed to its present form raise many questions. The main goal of this work is to test two hypotheses concerning the development of the genetic code for their compatibility and complementarity and see if they could benefit from each other. On the one hand, Gonzalez, Giannerini and Rosa developed a theory, based on four-based codons, which they called tesserae. This theory can explain the degeneracy of the modern vertebrate mitochondrial code. On the other hand, in the 1990s, so-called circular codes were discovered in nature, which seem to ensure the maintenance of a correct readingframe during the translation process. It turns out that the two concepts not only do not contradict each other, but on the contrary complement and enrichen each other. Keywords Genetic code · Degeneracy · Circular code · Tessera
1 Introduction In 1986, John Maynard Smith stated: “We understand biological phenomena only when we have invented machines with similar properties” (Smith 1986, pp 99–100). This quotation explains the motivation of this work quite well. This paper was written in order to better understand the origin of the genetic code using such a machinery. One possible machine or rather a model which gives a feasible explanation for an important aspect of the evolutionary processes of the genetic code was found by Gonzalez, Giannerini and Rosa. In their work “On the origin of degeneration in the genetic code” (Gonzalez et al. 2019) they focus on the degeneracy of amino acid
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Elena Fimmel [email protected] Martin Starman [email protected] Lutz Strüngmann [email protected]
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Institute of Mathematical Biology, Faculty for Computer Sciences, Mannheim University of Applied Sciences, 68163 Mannheim, Germany
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coding and especially on symmetry as an essential cause and consequence of the natural phenomena of degeneracy (compare also Fimmel and Strüngmann 2016). A famous example, which shows the importance of including symmetry deliberations when considering natural phenomena, can be found in quantum mechanics. Here, symmetry describes more than just the patterns that matter takes – it is used to classify the nature of quantum states. This is by far not the only example of its kind. Noether’s theorem even states a one-to-one connection between fundamental laws of nature so-called conservation laws- and respective symmetries in nature. Taking these general considerations into account, Gonzalez, Giannerini, and Rosa argue that none of the theories regarding the origin of the genetic code pays the necessary attention to the idea of symmetry (Gonzalez et al. 2019). As a consequence the concept of tessera codes was developed. The tesserae build a subset of all tetranucleotides, cho
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