Timeline for Advantageous properties of 4 letter alphabet (in DNA)?
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
12 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| S Jul 27, 2010 at 16:33 | vote | accept | Mustafa Gokhan Benli | ||
| Jul 27, 2010 at 16:33 | |||||
| Jul 27, 2010 at 16:33 | vote | accept | Mustafa Gokhan Benli | ||
| S Jul 27, 2010 at 16:33 | |||||
| Jul 18, 2010 at 13:21 | answer | added | Steve Huntsman | timeline score: 1 | |
| Jul 18, 2010 at 13:06 | answer | added | Joseph O'Rourke | timeline score: 10 | |
| Jul 18, 2010 at 12:52 | comment | added | Rob Grey | There might also be a genome-compactness/efficiency vs. chemical complexity/difficulty-of-error-correction argument. | |
| Jul 18, 2010 at 12:49 | comment | added | Rob Grey | If you believe in the RNA world, this probably originated as some sort of compromise between having a minimally complex chemistry with sufficiently interesting enzymatic/catalytic behavior. | |
| Jul 18, 2010 at 12:10 | comment | added | Thomas Bloom | Also, there are technically more than four bases - there are less common modified bases, such as m5C. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleobase. | |
| Jul 18, 2010 at 12:02 | comment | added | Franz Lemmermeyer | I'm no expert either, but to me this looks a lot more like numerology than biology or chemistry, let alone mathematics. | |
| Jul 18, 2010 at 10:49 | comment | added | Helge | I'm no expert, but I would expect the answer to be chemistry or biology and not mathematics. The four letters correspond to certain acids, and so it's not simply an encoding, but also has a functional part. | |
| Jul 18, 2010 at 10:11 | comment | added | Anthony Labarre | Well, you could say that only two bits are needed to encode the alphabet. But then the question becomes "Why is two advantageous?". I could then answer that many combinatorial problems are "easy" in two dimensions and "hard" in more dimensions, but this then leads to the question of what you want to do with DNA, and so on ... ;-) | |
| Jul 18, 2010 at 9:28 | history | edited | Yemon Choi | CC BY-SA 2.5 |
tweaked title, added tag
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| Jul 18, 2010 at 9:08 | history | asked | Mustafa Gokhan Benli | CC BY-SA 2.5 |