Say, in the context of finding microbial life on Mars (i.e., organisms that evolved from the start with six nucleotides, not just taking current terrestrial organisms and swapping out the nucleic acids and ribosomes).
Say, in the context of finding microbial life on Mars (i.e., organisms that evolved from the start with six nucleotides, not just taking current terrestrial organisms and swapping out the nucleic acids and ribosomes).
I’m no biologist (I’ve only had some basic biochemistry), could you elaborate on this? As far as I can recall, each codon encodes a specific amino acid, which means that a single base pair being mistranscripted leads to the wrong amino acid, potentially breaking the protein.
Not sure I get what you mean here either? The difference is in whether each base(-pair) encodes a binary or a ternary bit. Lossless compression redundant data (i.e. what you do when moving from a binary to ternary format) doesn’t change the signal-to-noise ratio.
There are 4 × 4 × 4 = 64 possible codons, but only 20(-ish) amino acids. This leaves quite a few spares for some built-in redundancy.
For example, UCU, UCC, UCA, and UCG all code for Serine. The third letter can mutate or be mistranscribed, and still produce an identical protein.