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SECONDARY VARIATIONS. “The standard genetic code is virtually universal among extant life forms. Although many deviations from the universal code exist, particularly in organelles and prokaryotes with small genomes, they are limited in scope and obviously secondary.” https://lnkd.in/ddaxciH View in LinkedIn

NOT OPTIMAL. “However, the standard genetic code is far from being optimal because, given the enormous overall number of possible codes (>10(84)), billions of variants are even more robust to error.” http://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/7/2/22/htm View in LinkedIn

HIGH FIDELITY. “Quantitative analyses of the code using cost functions derived from physico-chemical properties of amino acids or their evolutionary exchangeability have confirmed the exceptional robustness of the standard genetic code: the probability to reach the same level of error minimization as in the standard genetic code by random permutation of codons is below 10(-6).” http://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/7/2/22/htm View in LinkedIn

ERROR PROTECTION. “The code is robust to error, i.e., mutational and translation errors in synonymous positions (typically, the third position in a codon) have no effect on the protein, whereas substitutions in the first position typically lead to incorporation of an amino acid similar to the correct one, thus decreasing the damage.” http://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/7/2/22/htm View in LinkedIn

AN EXTRAORDINARY INITIATIVE to re-green the world by wealthy philanthropists. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/meet-the-knepp-group-the-billionaires-dedicated-to-rewilding-the-environment-dgqrmxl9w View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this first weekend contemplating the (almost) universal genetic code. While this is the configuration of inheritance on this planet, it is unlikely that it should be the same signature of life on other planets, or form a basis for the search for other life forms. On Earth, it has been a lucky accident, driven by the local physical conditions and material constraints of the planet. More than likely, there are thousands of other solutions to the same basic challenge of encoding inheritance. View in LinkedIn

HIGHLY UNIFORM. “Understanding how this code originated and how it affects the molecular biology and evolution of life today are challenging problems, in part because it is so highly conserved — without variation to observe it is difficult to dissect the functional implications of different aspects of a character.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982216309174 View in LinkedIn

CIPHER NOT A CODE. “The code is actually closer to a cipher than a code, and individual species do not have a unique genetic code to be cracked; indeed one of the interesting characteristics of the code is that nearly all life shares exactly the same one, once called the ‘universal genetic code’.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982216309174 View in LinkedIn

COMMON BUNKUM. “We often hear in the scientific and even popular press that the ‘genetic code’ of some organism has been ‘cracked’ by genomics, which is of course total nonsense. The genetic code is not the nucleotide sequence of the genome, but rather the set of rules by which those nucleotides are translated into amino acids and by extension genes into proteins.“ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982216309174 View in LinkedIn

SHEER LUCK. “It is tempting to think that a system so central to life should be elegant, but of course that’s not how evolution works; the genetic code was not designed by clever scientists, but rather built through a series of contingencies.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982216309174 View in LinkedIn