ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2005
A mechanism for the association of amino acids with their codons and the origin of the genetic code.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2005. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 47 papers.
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47 citing papers in PubMed, 134 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Science of the gaps.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Peptides En Route from Prebiotic to Biotic Catalysis.Accounts of chemical research · 2024Article
- Autocatalytic Selection as a Driver for the Origin of Life.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Biophysical Interactions Underpin the Emergence of Information in the Genetic Code.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
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- A Cofactor-Based Mechanism for the Origin of the Genetic Code.Origins of life and evolution of the biosphere : the journal of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life · 2022Article
- Computational Analysis of a Prebiotic Amino Acid Synthesis with Reference to Extant Codon-Amino Acid Relationships.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- The Combinatorial Fusion Cascade to Generate the Standard Genetic Code.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Archaeal pseudomurein and bacterial murein cell wall biosynthesis share a common evolutionary ancestry.FEMS microbes · 2021Article
- Quantitative elucidation of associations between nucleotide identity and physicochemical properties of amino acids and the functional insight.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2021Article
- Photon Dissipation as the Origin of Information Encoding in RNA and DNA.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Article
- The Future of Origin of Life Research: Bridging Decades-Old Divisions.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Article
- Physicochemical Foundations of Life that Direct Evolution: Chance and Natural Selection are not Evolutionary Driving Forces.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The genetic code has certain regularities that have resisted mechanistic interpretation. These include strong correlations between the first base of codons and the precursor from which the encoded amino acid is synthesized and between the second base of codons and the hydrophobicity of the encoded amino acid. These regularities are even more striking in a projection of the modern code onto a simpler code consisting of doublet codons encoding a set of simple amino acids. These regularities can be explained if, before the emergence of macromolecules, simple amino acids were synthesized in covalent complexes of dinucleotides with alpha-keto acids originating from the reductive tricarboxylic acid cycle or reductive acetate pathway. The bases and phosphates of the dinucleotide are proposed to have enhanced the rates of synthetic reactions leading to amino acids in a small-molecule reaction network that preceded the RNA translation apparatus but created an association between amino acids and the first two bases of their codons that was retained when translation emerged later in evolution.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.