Carter, C.W., Jr. Base Pairing Promoted the Self-Organization of Genetic Coding, Catalysis, and Free-Energy Transduction. Life2024, 14, 199.
Carter, C.W., Jr. Base Pairing Promoted the Self-Organization of Genetic Coding, Catalysis, and Free-Energy Transduction. Life 2024, 14, 199.
Carter, C.W., Jr. Base Pairing Promoted the Self-Organization of Genetic Coding, Catalysis, and Free-Energy Transduction. Life2024, 14, 199.
Carter, C.W., Jr. Base Pairing Promoted the Self-Organization of Genetic Coding, Catalysis, and Free-Energy Transduction. Life 2024, 14, 199.
Abstract
How Nature discovered genetic coding is a largely ignored question, yet the answer is key to explaining the transition from biochemical building blocks to life. Other, related puzzles also fall inside the aegis enclosing the codes themselves. The peptide bond is unstable with respect to hydrolysis. So, it requires some form of chemical free energy to drive it. Amino acid activation and acyl-transfer are also slow and call for catalysis. All living things must thus also convert free energy and synchronize cellular chemistry. Most importantly, functional proteins occupy only small, isolated regions of sequence space. Nature evolved heritable symbolic data processing to seek out and use those sequences. That system has three parts: a memory of how amino acids behave in solution and inside proteins, a set of code-keys to access that memory, and a scoring function. The code-keys themselves are the genes for cognate pairs of tRNA and aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases, AARS. I outline the surprising links between all these questions and the structural duality of the base-pairing that holds genes together and how those links arise from the experiments.
Keywords
aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase•tRNA cognate pairs; bidirectional genetic coding; protein folding and gating; origin of catalysis; origin of free energy transduction; genome propagation into the proteome
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
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.
