Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: Using the tools of many-body theory, I analyze problems in four different areas of biology dominated by strong fluctuations: The evolutionary history of the genetic code, spatiotem-poral pattern formation in ecology, spatiotemporal pattern formation in neuroscience and the robustness of a model circadian rhythm circuit in systems biology. In the first two research chapters, I demonstrate that the genetic code is extremely optimal (in the sense that it manages the effects of point mutations or mistranslations efficiently), more than an order of magnitude beyond what was previously thought. I further show that the structure of the genetic code implies that early proteins were probably only loosely defined. Both the nature of early proteins and the extreme optimality of the genetic code are interpreted in light of recent theory [1] as evidence that the evolution of the genetic code was driven by evolutionary dynamics that were dominated by horizontal gene transfer. I then explore the optimality of a proposed precursor to the genetic code. The results show that the precursor code has only limited optimality, which is interpreted as evidence that the precursor emerged prior to translation, or else never existed.
Author: Thomas Butler
Language: English
Subfield: Molecular Biology
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1680786835