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DNA's Error Detecting Code
MagnetarJones writes "Science News Online and Nature.com - Genetic information stored in DNA is read out - transcribed - every time living cells make a new protein molecule to perform some cell function. And this information is copied onto a new strand of DNA when a cell divides. The consequences of wrongly read or copied information can be disastrous. Malfunctioning genes can cause diseases and defects. Errors can occasionally have beneficial effects - they create the mutations that drive the evolutionary process - but they are usually detrimental. Strands of DNA carry information--of the genetic sort--encoded in their chemical structure. Chemist Dónall A. Mac Dónaill of Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, has now shown that patterns inherent in the chemical makeup of DNA correspond to a digital error-detecting code. His report appears in the Sept. 12 Chemical Communications."
This is a duplicate of Monday's /.
Not only a repeat, but we pretty much decided that he's not telling us anything new. Suprise! DNA is more reliable if you require 3 valid hydrogen bonds, than if you only require two, or one. Only two interesting points to the article: They showed that the full alphabet of the even parity (4,3) code isn't used because those nucleotides would be unstable. Another Suprise! An alphabet of 4 yields 2 bits of information per nucleotide. The other interesting thing I found in the paper is that the normal polymerase will replicate a strand of odd-parity nucleotides just as well as even. Except that wasn't even part of this research, it was in a reference!
If you're going to use windows-1252 characters in stories, the least you can do is actually *mention* it in the Content-type or meta tags.
/. does. Well done. We all really enjoy those ?'s and squares in place of em-dashes and co :)
Well, no, the least you can do is not provide any charset data at all, which is exactly what
Lessee, if you represent each base with an odd-parity number, then DNA seems to be doing parity checking? Perhaps another researcher will interpret each nucleotide as a physical representation of a large prime, and claim that DNA is actually RSA-encrypted.
Honestly, does anyone really think that the the "Publish or Perish" academic survival constraint has encouraged the evolution of better academics? Perhaps Slashdot's karma model should be extended to all of academia, with some large percentage of all available funding distributed accordingly.
"How's your ZPE-generator work coming, Roy?"
"It's been cancelled, Sigfried. The whole project got modded Offtopic! But everyone says your 10^1024-qubit computer is quite Insightful. What do you think your chances are of getting the Nobel for this one?"
"Excellent--mostly affected by moderation done to my papers."
While DNA has error correction working well, it has not yet developed a reliable way to avoid redundant information.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.