From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Dec 27 2000 - 17:12:30 MST
Andy Toth <antst20+@pitt.edu> writes:
> is there any 'evidence' to indicate that amino
> acids were ever coded with 2 base pairs? why would the system begin at
> three?
Yes, there is some 'evidence'. We actually got it as an exercise in a
lovely little course on noise and randomness in biology to derive a
likely 2 base pair code. It turns out that the third base pair is not
as significant as the first two, and for most amino acids it is
redundant. When you move beyond the primordial soup and don't want to
share your survival tricks with everything in the vicinity, then a
less error-prone transcription starts to make sense.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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