The information capacity of the genetic code: is the natural code optimal?

Kuruoglu E. E, Arndt P. F.

Modeling and Simulation  Kimura model  General Medicine  Information capacity  Mutation models  Shannon theory  General Immunology and Microbiology  Genetic code  Genetics and Molecular Biology  DNA  General Agricultural and Biological Sciences  Simulated annealing  Statistics and Probability  General Biochemistry  Frozen accident  Applied Mathematics  Information theory  Genetic coevolution 

We envision the molecular evolution process as an information transfer process and provide a quantitative measure for information preservation in terms of the channel capacity according to the channel coding theorem of Shannon. We calculate Information capacities of DNA on the nucleotide (for non-coding DNA) and amino acid (for coding DNA) level using various substitution models. We extend our results on coding DNA to a discussion about the optimality of the natural codon-amino acid code. We provide the results of an adaptive search algorithm in the code domain and demonstrate the existence of a large number of genetic codes with higher information capacity. Our results support the hypothesis of an ancient extension from a 2-nucleotide codon to the current 3-nucleotide codon code to encode the various amino acids.

Source: Journal of theoretical biology 419 (2017): 227–237. doi:10.1016/j.jtbi.2017.01.046

Publisher: Academic Press,, London,, Regno Unito

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