ArticleLife (Basel, Switzerland)2017
Frozen Accident Pushing 50: Stereochemistry, Expansion, and Chance in the Evolution of 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 34 papers.
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Who cites it
34 citing papers in PubMed, 76 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Avoiding Catastrophic Mutations Accurately Predicts Amino Acid to Codon Pairing.Journal of molecular evolution · 2026Article
- Impact of GC content on de novo gene birth.Nature communications · 2026Article
- The Role of Mutations, Addition of Amino Acids, and Exchange of Genetic Information in the Coevolution of Primitive Coding Systems.International journal of molecular sciences · 2025Article
- Traces of a Primitive RNA Ring in Current Genomes.Biology · 2025Article
- The Origin(s) of LUCA: Computer Simulation of a New Theory.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Evolution at the Origins of Life?Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Article
- Nontriplet feature of genetic code inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Screening for Primordial RNA-Peptide Interactions Using High-Density Peptide Arrays.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Prebiotic Assembly of Cloverleaf tRNA, Its Aminoacylation and the Origin of Coding, Inferred from Acceptor Stem Coding-Triplets.International journal of molecular sciences · 2022Article
- Asymptotic burnout and homeostatic awakening: a possible solution to the Fermi paradox?Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- Model of Genetic Code Structure Evolution under Various Types of Codon Reading.International journal of molecular sciences · 2022Article
- Amino Acid Specificity of Ancestral Aminoacyl-tRNA Synthetase Prior to the Last Universal Common Ancestor Commonote commonote.Journal of molecular evolution · 2022Article
- The Combinatorial Fusion Cascade to Generate the Standard Genetic Code.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- 'Whole Organism', Systems Biology, and Top-Down Criteria for Evaluating Scenarios for the Origin of Life.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- Combinatorial Fusion Rules to Describe Codon Assignment in the Standard Genetic Code.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Article
- Origin of Life: The Point of No Return.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Article
- Photon Dissipation as the Origin of Information Encoding in RNA and DNA.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Nearly 50 years ago, Francis Crick propounded the frozen accident scenario for the evolution of the genetic code along with the hypothesis that the early translation system consisted primarily of RNA. Under the frozen accident perspective, the code is universal among modern life forms because any change in codon assignment would be highly deleterious. The frozen accident can be considered the default theory of code evolution because it does not imply any specific interactions between amino acids and the cognate codons or anticodons, or any particular properties of the code. The subsequent 49 years of code studies have elucidated notable features of the standard code, such as high robustness to errors, but failed to develop a compelling explanation for codon assignments. In particular, stereochemical affinity between amino acids and the cognate codons or anticodons does not seem to account for the origin and evolution of the code. Here, I expand Crick's hypothesis on RNA-only translation system by presenting evidence that this early translation already attained high fidelity that allowed protein evolution. I outline an experimentally testable scenario for the evolution of the code that combines a distinct version of the stereochemical hypothesis, in which amino acids are recognized via unique sites in the tertiary structure of proto-tRNAs, rather than by anticodons, expansion of the code via proto-tRNA duplication, and the frozen accident.
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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.