ArticleScientific reports2018
Horizontal transfer of code fragments between protocells can explain the origins of the genetic code without vertical descent.
Article in Scientific reports, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 19 citations in OpenAlex.
- Order of amino acid recruitment into the genetic code resolved by last universal common ancestor's protein domains.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Order of amino acid recruitment into the genetic code resolved by Last Universal Common Ancestor's protein domains.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Ordering events in a developing genetic code.RNA biology · 2024Article
- A crescendo of competent coding (c3) contains the Standard Genetic Code.RNA (New York, N.Y.) · 2022Article
- Sequencing the origins of life.BBA advances · 2022Review
- The Standard Genetic Code can Evolve from a Two-Letter GC Code Without Information Loss or Costly Reassignments.Origins of life and evolution of the biosphere : the journal of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Theories of the origin of the genetic code typically appeal to natural selection and/or mutation of hereditable traits to explain its regularities and error robustness, yet the present translation system presupposes high-fidelity replication. Woese's solution to this bootstrapping problem was to assume that code optimization had played a key role in reducing the effect of errors caused by the early translation system. He further conjectured that initially evolution was dominated by horizontal exchange of cellular components among loosely organized protocells ("progenotes"), rather than by vertical transmission of genes. Here we simulated such communal evolution based on horizontal transfer of code fragments, possibly involving pairs of tRNAs and their cognate aminoacyl tRNA synthetases or a precursor tRNA ribozyme capable of catalysing its own aminoacylation, by using an iterated learning model. This is the first model to confirm Woese's conjecture that regularity, optimality, and (near) universality could have emerged via horizontal interactions alone.
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