A colorful origin for the genetic code: Information theory, statistical mechanics and the emergence of molecular codes

T Tlusty - Physics of life reviews, 2010 - Elsevier
The genetic code maps the sixty-four nucleotide triplets (codons) to twenty amino-acids.
While the biochemical details of this code were unraveled long ago, its origin is still obscure …

Robust ecological pattern formation induced by demographic noise

T Butler, N Goldenfeld - Physical Review E—Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft …, 2009 - APS
We demonstrate that demographic noise can induce persistent spatial pattern formation and
temporal oscillations in the Levin-Segel predator-prey model for plankton-herbivore …

Fluctuation-driven Turing patterns

T Butler, N Goldenfeld - Physical Review E—Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft …, 2011 - APS
Models of diffusion-driven pattern formation that rely on the Turing mechanism are utilized in
many areas of science. However, many such models suffer from the defect of requiring fine …

Universal biology and the statistical mechanics of early life

N Goldenfeld, T Biancalani… - … Transactions of the …, 2017 - royalsocietypublishing.org
All known life on the Earth exhibits at least two non-trivial common features: the canonical
genetic code and biological homochirality, both of which emerged prior to the Last Universal …

The genetic code is very close to a global optimum in a model of its origin taking into account both the partition energy of amino acids and their biosynthetic …

F Caldararo, M Di Giulio - Biosystems, 2022 - Elsevier
We used the Moran's I index of global spatial autocorrelation with the aim of studying the
distribution of the physicochemical or biological properties of amino acids within the genetic …

On the physical basis of the amino acid polar requirement

DC Mathew, Z Luthey-Schulten - Journal of molecular evolution, 2008 - Springer
Understanding how codons became associated with their specific amino acids is
fundamental to deriving a theory for the origin of the genetic code. Carl Woese and …

A binary representation of the genetic code

LR Nemzer - Biosystems, 2017 - Elsevier
This article introduces a novel binary representation of the canonical genetic code based on
both the structural similarities of the nucleotides, as well as the physicochemical properties …

Sequence signatures of direct complementarity between mRNAs and cognate proteins on multiple levels

M Hlevnjak, AA Polyansky, B Zagrovic - Nucleic acids research, 2012 - academic.oup.com
A potential connection between physico-chemical properties of mRNAs and cognate
proteins, with implications concerning both the origin of the genetic code and mRNA–protein …

Genetic code evolution reveals the neutral emergence of mutational robustness, and information as an evolutionary constraint

SE Massey - Life, 2015 - mdpi.com
The standard genetic code (SGC) is central to molecular biology and its origin and evolution
is a fundamental problem in evolutionary biology, the elucidation of which promises to …

Path-integral calculation for the emergence of rapid evolution from demographic stochasticity

HY Shih, N Goldenfeld - Physical Review E, 2014 - APS
Genetic variation in a population can sometimes arise so fast as to modify ecosystem
dynamics. Such phenomena have been observed in natural predator-prey systems and …