Version 1
: Received: 13 September 2019 / Approved: 14 September 2019 / Online: 14 September 2019 (19:44:54 CEST)
How to cite:
Mejía, J.; Michaelian, K. Entropy Production as the Origin of Information Encoding in RNA and DNA. Preprints2019, 2019090146. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints201909.0146.v1
Mejía, J.; Michaelian, K. Entropy Production as the Origin of Information Encoding in RNA and DNA. Preprints 2019, 2019090146. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints201909.0146.v1
Mejía, J.; Michaelian, K. Entropy Production as the Origin of Information Encoding in RNA and DNA. Preprints2019, 2019090146. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints201909.0146.v1
APA Style
Mejía, J., & Michaelian, K. (2019). Entropy Production as the Origin of Information Encoding in RNA and DNA. Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints201909.0146.v1
Chicago/Turabian Style
Mejía, J. and Karo Michaelian. 2019 "Entropy Production as the Origin of Information Encoding in RNA and DNA" Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints201909.0146.v1
Abstract
Ultraviolet light incident on organic material can initiate its spontaneous dissipative structuring into chromophores which can catalyze their own replication. This may have been the case for one of the most ancient of all chromophores dissipating the Archean UVC photon flux, the nucleic acids. Oligos of nucleic acids with affinity to particular amino acids which foment UVC photon dissipation would have been selected through non-equilibrium thermodynamic imperatives which favor entropy production. Indeed, we show here that those amino acids with characteristics most relevant to fomenting UVC photon dissipation are precisely those with greatest chemical affinity to their codons or anticodons. Entropy production could thus provide an explanation for the accumulation of information in nucleic acids relevant to the dissipation of the externally imposed thermodynamic potentials. The accumulation of information in this manner provides a link between evolution and entropy production.
Keywords
entropy; entropy production; non-equilibrium thermodynamics; information encoding; nucleic acids; DNA; RNA; origin of life; origin of codons; amino acids; stereochemical era; photon potential
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Biophysics
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.