DNA Goes Binary

Anonymous Coward writes "Chemists in the United States have constructed the simplest possible genetic language. Like Morse or binary code, it has only two letters - but it can orchestrate some of the basic molecular reactions needed for life to evolve."

Comments

Not exactly.

[The Monster]

Chemists in the United States have constructed the simplest possible genetic language.

What they've found is that they can build a functional ribozyme out of diaminopurine and uracil.

We've all probably seen perfectly valid i86 machine code entirely composed of printable ASCII, too, (I recall one which could be used to convert binaries to emailable text, which was used to post DOS utilities back in the day) but that doesn't make it a 'language' that the processor understands

I'm Not Convinced

[Anonymous Coward]

* The more likely operator during those early days would have been something with only 2 bases.

This is pure conjecture. The *early days* could have well been a mixture of many purines and pyrimidines, and the AGCT and U won out in the replication arena due to the thermodynamic stability/instability of their base pairing (A+T, G+C in DNA and A+U, G+C and G+U in RNA). If diaminopurine was a major player, then it should have survived. It didn't, so there is really no reason to believe that it ever was a major (if any) player in the genetic game.

And another something else also cool...

[Guppy]

"You wanna see something cool... how about DNA having a parity bit?? Take a peek...."

Here's another something else interesting -- the equivalent of a DNA RAID Array, found in the microbe Deinococcus radiodurans. This particular bacterium has the distinction of being the most radiation-resistant organism known.

D. radiodurans posses four copies of its circular chromosome, stacked together like a roll of Lifesavers. This alignment allows for fast and efficient repair of any errors.