ArticleLife (Basel, Switzerland)2017
What Froze the Genetic Code?
Article in Life (Basel, Switzerland), 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- From water to land: evolution of tRNA gene repertoires in photosynthetic organisms.The EMBO journal · 2026Review
- Reduced Amino Acid Substitution Matrices Find Traces of Ancient Coding Alphabets in Modern Day Proteins.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Enzymic recognition of amino acids drove the evolution of primordial genetic codes.Nucleic acids research · 2024Article
- Domain collapse and active site ablation generate a widespread animal mitochondrial seryl-tRNA synthetase.Nucleic acids research · 2023Article
- On the Evolutionary History of the Twenty Encoded Amino Acids.Chemistry (Weinheim an der Bergstrasse, Germany) · 2022Review
- Genome Evolution from Random Ligation of RNAs of Autocatalytic Sets.International journal of molecular sciences · 2021Article
- Human tRNAs with inosine 34 are essential to efficiently translate eukarya-specific low-complexity proteins.Nucleic acids research · 2021Article
- Inosine in Biology and Disease.Genes · 2021Review
- On the Track of the Missing tRNA Genes: A Source of Non-Canonical Functions?Frontiers in molecular biosciences · 2021Review
- Evolution of Life on Earth: tRNA, Aminoacyl-tRNA Synthetases and the Genetic Code.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Review
- The Alanine World Model for the Development of the Amino Acid Repertoire in Protein Biosynthesis.International journal of molecular sciences · 2019Review
- A tRNA- and Anticodon-Centric View of the Evolution of Aminoacyl-tRNA Synthetases, tRNAomes, and the Genetic Code.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2019Review
- tRNA deamination by ADAT requires substrate-specific recognition mechanisms and can be inhibited by tRFs.RNA (New York, N.Y.) · 2019Article
- Codon adaptation to tRNAs with Inosine modification at position 34 is widespread among Eukaryotes and present in two Bacterial phyla.RNA biology · 2018Article
- Protein folding and tRNA biology.Biophysical reviews · 2017Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The frozen accident theory of the Genetic Code was a proposal by Francis Crick that attempted to explain the universal nature of the Genetic Code and the fact that it only contains information for twenty amino acids. Fifty years later, it is clear that variations to the universal Genetic Code exist in nature and that translation is not limited to twenty amino acids. However, given the astonishing diversity of life on earth, and the extended evolutionary time that has taken place since the emergence of the extant Genetic Code, the idea that the translation apparatus is for the most part immobile remains true. Here, we will offer a potential explanation to the reason why the code has remained mostly stable for over three billion years, and discuss some of the mechanisms that allow species to overcome the intrinsic functional limitations of the protein synthesis machinery.
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