Patel Apoorva
Centre for Theoretical Studies and Supercomputer Education and Research Centre, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560 012, India.
J Biosci. 2002 Jun;27(3):207-18. doi: 10.1007/BF02704910.
Information is often encoded as an aperiodic chain of building blocks. Modern digital computers use bits as the building blocks, but in general the choice of building blocks depends on the nature of the information to be encoded. What are the optimal building blocks to encode structural information? This can be analysed by substituting the operations of addition and multiplication of conventional arithmetic with translation and rotation. It is argued that at the molecular level, the best component for encoding discretized structural information is carbon. Living organisms discovered this billions of years ago, and used carbon as the back-bone for constructing proteins that function according to their structure. Structural analysis of polypeptide chains shows that an efficient and versatile structural language of 20 building blocks is needed to implement all the tasks carried out by proteins. Properties of amino acids indicate that the present triplet genetic code was preceded by a more primitive one, coding for 10 amino acids using two nucleotide bases.
信息通常被编码为一个由构建模块组成的非周期性链条。现代数字计算机使用比特作为构建模块，但一般来说，构建模块的选择取决于要编码的信息的性质。用于编码结构信息的最佳构建模块是什么？这可以通过用平移和旋转替代传统算术的加法和乘法运算来进行分析。有人认为，在分子层面，用于编码离散结构信息的最佳组件是碳。数十亿年前，活生物体就发现了这一点，并将碳用作构建根据其结构发挥功能的蛋白质的骨架。多肽链的结构分析表明，需要一种由20个构建模块组成的高效且通用的结构语言来执行蛋白质所执行的所有任务。氨基酸的特性表明，当前的三联体遗传密码之前有一个更原始的密码，它使用两个核苷酸碱基编码10种氨基酸。
